It’s hard to know what John McCain was thinking, of course, and this whole campaign suspension thing is patently ludicrous, but at some level you have to sympathize with the poor guy. How was he to guess that this crappy idea would blow up in his face? None of the previous crappy ideas had. And what was the poor sod to do anyway? He’d already made a complete ass of himself in twenty different ways just in the last few days. There’s no way he was going to survive a debate with Obama on Friday.

Not with Obama hitting him on his fumbling, bumbling response to the financial sector meltdown:

When the crisis on Wall Street began, and the markets began tanking nine days ago, the very first message from John McCain was, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.” That didn’t work, and McCain dropped the line.

His second message was that he wanted to see a commission investigate how and why the crisis happened. That made McCain appear confused, so he dropped that line, too.

His third message was in opposition to the AIG bailout. That didn’t last, and McCain took the opposite position 24 hours later.

His fourth message was to fire Christopher Cox from the Securities and Exchange Commission. That turned out to be ridiculous, and McCain dropped the line, too.

His fifth message was to blame lobbyists, influence peddlers, and the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That became problematic given the lobbyists and former Fannie/Freddie officials on McCain’s payroll.

Not with Obama giving him grief over how deeply trammeled he is with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbyists, and how consistently he and his campaign have misrepresented campaign manager Rick Davis‘s ongoing financial relationship with Freddie Mac:

Not with Obama having thoroughly wrested the initiative from McCain on responding to the thoroughly misconceived Paulson bailout proposal:

“At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing 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,” said Bill Burton, the spokesman for the Obama campaign.

“At 2:30 this afternoon,” he added, “Senator McCain returned Senator Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement.”

The reason why Obama apparently thought it made sense to call McCain in the first place is that when McCain finally got around to articulating his position on the bailout plan — 48 hours after Obama — his position turned out to be pretty much identical to Obama’s.

Presumably, the campaign suspension stunt was supposed to be McCain’s brilliant escape from the no-win situation he found himself in. But McCain’s real talent seems to lie in placing himself in one no-win situation after another. And so that’s all he ended up achieving.

Harry Reid has hung out the unwelcome mat on Capitol Hill:

I understand that the candidates are putting together a joint statement at Senator Obama’s suggestion. But it would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy. If that changes, we will call upon them. We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.

Both Obama and the American people have already rejected McCain’s plan to postpone Friday’s debate.

So now McCain can look foolish by showing up for the debate after all, or look even more foolish by staying away.

Or maybe this is the key to the master plan:

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

Assuming that Obama and Biden stick to their plan (the original plan), and McCain sticks to his plan and skips the presidential debate and shows up for the VP debate, we would have the perfectly ludicrous spectacle of Obama winning the presidential debate by a TKO, McCain debating Biden on October 2, and Baby Sarah once again being saved from a fate worse than death.

(In fact, there is a school of thought which holds that it was the unmitigated debacle of Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric — broadcast last night but taped early in the day — that caused the panic that precipitated McCain’s high jinks):

While there’s certainly a lot going on right now, I’m pretty confident that if McCain hadn’t engaged in his late afternoon theatrics, (two devastating Palin clips) would have been in heavy circulation tonight and tomorrow, especially in light of the mini-press corps revolt that everyone was talking about yesterday.

I think the McCain campaign knew the Couric interview would be a disaster as soon as it was done taping and spent much of the day frantically trying to think of a way to push it out of the headlines. The clincher for me is the fact that McCain cancelled his Letterman appearance at the last second and instead sat down for an impromptu interview with, of all people, Katie Couric. The hope was to bump the Palin interview even on the CBS Evening News, which otherwise would have hyped and teased the Palin interview all afternoon and used it to lead the broadcast. Instead, CBS devoted most of its coverage to McCain and played segments of the Palin interview almost as an afterthought. Mission accomplished.

Who knows what concatenation of panics actually set McCain off? All that’s clear is that something made him soil his pants.)