McCain running away from debate -- who's he kidding?
UPDATE 2: I've posted sort of a counterpoint to this piece, which criticizes his opponent: Three Myths About the Town Hall Meetings Obama Refused To Do
UPDATE: He's not fooling Letterman either! From tonight's "Late Show":
What was I just saying about late night talk shows having the guts to say what MSM journalists will not?
John McCain doesn't like televised debates that much. Instead, he prefers to do town hall meetings, the informal Q-and-A sessions where he can engage the people directly without interference from that pesky news media. And no wonder: he revived his 2008 presidential bid by barnstorming the country doing town halls.
Today, McCain announced that he wants to skip Friday's first presidential debate with Barack Obama because it's in the "national interest" to deal with the impending financial situation.
I think these facts are not unrelated. If McCain succeeds in cancelling Friday's debate, that would leave just two scheduled opportunities for his opponent to engage him directly on national television ... and one of them would be a town hall meeting.
Well, it sort of serves Barack Obama right. Obama was the one, after all, who decided that a slim lead in the polls was reason enough to refuse McCain's calls for a series of town-hall meetings over the summer. I happen to believe that Obama would do pretty well in those town halls, because McCain has not held one where the room wasn't packed with Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, let alone held a town hall where his chief opponent was standing right there, ready to refute anything he said. Instead, he ducked out for political reasons, and now McCain is paying him back in his own currency.
So what does Obama do? Well, the only correct response to McCain's call to suspend the debate is to say: Forget it. And that is what both Ole Miss (the host school for Friday's debate) and Obama both said in their responses.
McCain's motives are transparent. He's not needed in Washington, so why does he want to go there? As Jonathan Alter rightly noted, John McCain has not exactly pushed a lot of heavy-hitting legislation during his 25 years as a senator. Mitch McConnell (despite his supportive comments today) is not awaiting McCain's arrival at Reagan Airport. McCain and Obama are needed in front of the American people, in a battle of ideas about our economic future.
And McCain will be happy to do that ... in a town-hall meeting. Friday's debate -- which was supposed to be about foreign policy -- is a more formalized affair with PBS's Jim Lehrer asking the questions, a format that supposedly favors Obama. (And to the commenter who seems to think Lehrer would stick to only asking questions about North Korea and Iraq ... c'mon. He's a journalist, not a robot.)
In a way, you can't blame McCain for trying to postpone an encounter with his opponent until the current fiscal mess blows off page one. Since Wall Street started its wild ride last week, Obama's lead over his GOP rival has widened to as much as nine points (WaPo) and gives him a pronounced lead in electoral college projections, as seen in the above chart posted today by the super-wonky 538.com.
Still, I'm reminded that McCain, at the 9/11 service forum, piously defended his running mate's derisive "community organizer" comment about Obama by saying, if my opponent had just agreed to debate me earlier this summer, we could have had a campaign of more substance. He can't fall back on that rejoinder any longer, because now he's the one perceived as avoiding a debate.
This just in: Keith Olbermann is filling in for McCain on Dave's show.
Previously on TV Barn: I pointed out that town-hall debates are usually devoid of tough follow-up questions that journalists like to ask. I wondered if ABC was frozen out of the debates because of the whole gotcha debate mess during the primaries. I chided the Obama campaign for going after a genial Chicago radio host because he dared to have two right-wing authors critical of Obama on his show.
