The Daily Background

A pathetic end to an even more pathetic stunt:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ended three days of suspense on Friday morning and announced that he will leave bailout negotiations in Washington and fly to Oxford, Miss., for the opening presidential debate.

McCain had previously said that he would suspend his campaign until an agreement was reached on the administration’s $700 billion mortgage proposal.

No such agreement has been reached, but Republicans said the standoff was hurting McCain’s campaign and that he would look terrible if he didn’t attend the nationally televised, eagerly anticipated debate while Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was ready to go on stage.

Really, there’s no real achievement on the bailout frnt that McCain has to justify the end of his “campaign suspension” other than that he was getting ridiculed to high heaven by just about everybody.

More:

Senator John McCain had intended to ride back into Washington on Thursday as a leader who had put aside presidential politics to help broker a solution to the financial crisis. Instead he found himself in the midst of a remarkable partisan showdown, lacking a clear public message for how to bring it to an end.

At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

Not too unexpected from the guy who admits that “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”

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