McCain's Suspension Ploy

John McCain has just announced that he'll be suspending his campaign in order to help deal with the economic crisis.

Why this is respectable:
It's pretty much universally agreed upon right now that the economy is in rough shape. The debate is over how to deal with it. One of the most obnoxious things to me about watching high level political campaigns is listening to congressmen, senators, and other high ranking elected officials talking about what they would do, or what should be done. These are people that are fully capable of moving the process forward to get those Woulds and Shoulds done, but they're too busy talking and not acting. I'm all about officials running their campaigns by putting on display that they're doing their jobs and doing it damn well.

Why this is clever political posturing:
McCain's poll numbers have been plummeting this week (even a Fox News poll has him down 6 points nationally, ABC has him up 9). Most people seem to agree that Obama is better equipped to cope with the economy, and have decided that he's not an elitist, but rather that his years helping poor people that had lost their jobs made him more aware of the plight of people who are afraid of losing their jobs and becoming poor. John McCain himself has announced that he's not a very good student of the economy, and he's been digging his own free market grave since he first came to Congress as part of the Reagan Revolution. Senator Six-Homes McCain is making a mad dash to make himself seem more sympathetic to the people his top economic advisor refers to as a "nation of whiners." Not only does it make McCain seem like he's rushing to the aid of the American people, and if Obama doesn't go along with it, Obama looks like he doesn't care. So either McCain's determining the staging of the race and looking more leaderly in the process or making Obama look aloof.

Why this is just a big load of crap:
This would all be very noble, except John McCain has no intention of being any less visible to the voting populace. He's not going to be "suspending" his campaign, he's just going to be campaigning from Washington in between meetings, and from the Senate floor. McCain is pushing this as a way to put himself a rung above electoral politics (the cornerstone of our democracy, by the way, and not something to consider yourself "above") as a man who cares nothing for himself and only about you, but he's only doing this to propagate an image so he can bring his poll numbers back up and get elected. If he weren't running for President, John McCain would be off talking to some B-list newspaper explaining yet again that he doesn't know much about the economy and staying on the fringes of the debate until another war came up that he could support.

To be fair, it's very well executed bullshit, but it is bullshit nonetheless.