John McCain Suspends Presidential Campaign
The nation's economic crisis took center stage in the presidential race today. Republican candidate John McCain said he was suspending his campaign to deal with the crisis and urged Democratic foe Barack Obama to do the same. McCain also requested that Friday's debate be postponed, but Obama said he believed it should be held.
Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama said at a news conference later Wednesday that he and McCain had spoken by phone and had agreed to issue a joint statement about shared principles in the approach to resolving the economic crisis.
But he disagreed with McCain's call for postponing Friday's first presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi.
"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person will be the next president," Obama said. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."
Congress and the White House are trying to negotiate the details of what would be the most sweeping economic intervention by the government since the Great Depression.
Republicans are calling upon McCain for leadership in Congress.
Still, Andrew Romano of Newsweek suggests that Obama could be placed in a bit of a box.
Either the Illinois senator flies from Florida to Washington and looks as if he's following McCain's lead, or he dismisses McCain's move as a stunt and gives the GOP fodder for two of its favorite attacks--that Obama a "self before country" type who's "all talk, no action." Either option has the potential to undermine Obama's greatest advantage--the perception that he's the better economic leader. For Chicago, the delicate political calculus was immediately apparent, as Obama spokesman Bill Burton swiftly claimed credit for the new spirit of solidarity in an email to reporters that said it was Obama who called McCain this morning to pitch a joint statement "outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal." Within minutes, the McCain campaign disputed Burton's timeline. Call it the politics of pretending to suspend politics.
It was unclear how this would affect polls and betting prediction markets although clearly the economic turmoil was taking a serious toll on John McCain's campaign. CNN is also reporting that a number of battleground states were starting to move in favor of Obama, including West Virginia.
The Democratic party was now a -180 favorite to win over the White House at Bookmaker.com after being at even odds just two weeks ago.
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Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher
