We're all conspiracy theorists now. I just want to get mine on the record.
Friday John McCain goes into a room with House Republicans and closes the door. Nothing will actually happen in there--maybe some blackjack--but we won't know.
Every once in awhile McCain will emerge to talk to reporters about difficult negotiations. He will confer with Republicans who represent the plan the House GOPers scuttled. Then he'll go back. Meanwhile the markets are going crazy. The business channels forecast apocalypse if a deal isn't struck today.
The door remains closed all day and into the evening. Now the news media is frantic: will McCain go to the debate? They wait outside the door. They wait, and wait. And then McCain emerges.
He announces that negotiations have reached a crucial stage, and he can't leave. Even if it means he loses the election, he has to stay. He goes back in, the door closes.
Then at 9 pm Barack Obama finds himself alone on the stage in Mississippi. Jim Lerher is still there, and they improvise a kind of moderated town hall meeting.
But about five minutes into it, the networks break in: there's word that McCain has an announcement. For awhile, it's a split screen: Obama talking, the closed door, but the voice you hear is an excited reporter.
Then the door opens. McCain comes out and announces that he's convinced House Republicans to go along with a slightly more modest version of the bill that the Senate, the House GOPer leadership and Paulsen proposed. He is confident that everyone will support the resulting bill.
The networks switch back to Mississippi, where Jim Lerher asks Obama for his reaction.
That's it. That's my conspiracy theory, and like all such theories, it has facts to suggest it. I only need one, and it is this: before the seemingly chaotic meeting at the White House on Thursday when the apparent deal was destroyed by a new proposal made by House Republicans--one that had been discredited even before it was proposed--and John McCain said nothing substantive at that meeting, John McCain had met with House Republicans.
Although there is also this: McCain's statement afterwards that he was confident he could bring House Republicans into the fold to support a deal.
It's a set-up. The media has been set up by the talk that the House GOPers hate McCain, and by the drama of what they did, and how the chaos erupted when McCain showed up. Obama was set up by being invited to the meeting, and then by McCain saying he wouldn't go to the debate. Once Obama said he would, then the rest of this scenario could work like a charm.
This may be overly imaginative. But I hope somebody in the Obama campaign is also overly imaginative, to the point of being able to see how Obama avoids getting crushed by such a ploy.