Looks like John McCain is backing out of the first presidential debate (or maybe all of them). He says he's urgently needed in Washington to solve the current financial crisis. No matter that he hadn't talked to any of the folks in Congress working on a bailout plan until YESTERDAY, he's still needed in the capital right now and has called in his white horse for transport. Last we heard, he was somewhere in New York this morning -- maybe the horse has a gimpy leg. It also looks like Congressional leaders have already hammered out the details of an agreement -- doggone it, John McCain missed out?

You can call this latest McCain stunt a lot of things: showmanship, grandstanding, one-upmanship, razzle-dazzle, a Hail Mary pass. What I call it is a game of chicken. McCain is plain and simple trying to back out of a debate, or compress the debate schedule so as to eliminate the VICE PRESIDENTIAL debate. He wasn't needed in Washington to solve this financial crisis any more than I was. What he did, folks, was take a cold, hard look at his poll numbers and the polling data behind them and decided that a debate was the last place he wanted to be. He tried to get Barack Obama to take the bait and agree to this gambit but the Senator from Illinois held firm, letting him know that he could do "more than one thing at once."

McCain is waiting to see if Obama blinks. I'm guessing Obama will stare him down and show up at the debate by himself if need be. Why not? The almost 20% of Americans who are still undecided in this election cycle want to hear from the candidates themselves. If Obama is the only one who wants to tell the people what he believes and is willing to answer the hard questions that go along with taking a position on an issue (no more teleprompter scripts, please, Senator McCain!), so be it.