My friends, I hate to admit it but John McCain is right: We should postpone the debates until further notice. We're facing the worst financial crisis this country has seen since the Great Depression. This is no time for rallies, town halls, debates, or even interviews and press conferences. It's time instead for the candidates to suspend everything else in their lives and focus on nothing but this crisis, 24/7.
If anything, my friends, McCain hasn't gone far enough--we should postpone the election outright.
I don't know much about American history, but I'm sure that skimming through Wikipedia I'll find plenty of precedent for putting a presidential campaign on hold because of a national crisis. More below the fold.
I'm sure, for example, that James Madison moved to suspend the presidential campaign of 1812 because of the War of 1812. There's simply no way he could've led the nation through that war and run for president...
Wait a minute...just finished reading the page...they went ahead with the campaign and the election after all, in the middle of a war! And what do you know? James Madison was reelected.
Then surely all presidential political activity was suspended in 1864, right in the thick of the Civil War. I'm sure Abraham Lincoln had his hands full with the war and had no time for a presidential campaign so...
Hold on. Looks like the campaign went ahead after all. And lo and behold, Lincoln won--in a landslide, too! How he managed to run a war and run for reelection I'll never understand.
That was just a Civil War though; I'm positive that Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't take time to run for reelection in 1940 and 1944, smack in the middle of World War II. The demands of that global conflict would preclude a presidential campaign and...ooops.
I really should read these all the way through before typing: FDR ran for reelection both times and won, and apparently this involved running political campaigns both times, right in the middle of WWII. The man must've had two brains or something.
So Wikipedia tells me that we've gone through major crises before, and we haven't had to put our presidential campaigns on hold, let alone our elections. So postponing these presidential debates would be a first.
Wow--John McCain really is a maverick after all.