By Samuel Rubenfeld
After 10 days of essentially ignoring the looming fiscal crisis, the candidates spent Wednesday afternoon sparring over who was the real leader to fix Wall Street’s woes.
Barack Obama called John McCain at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday morning about putting out a joint statement of principles about the $700 billion bailout being pushed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke; McCain countered by suspending his presidential campaign to return to Washington and requested for the first debate, scheduled for Friday in Oxford, Miss., to be postponed.
Obama flatly refused. “I believe we should continue to have the debate,” he said. “I believe it makes sense for us to present ourselves to the American people.”
Suspending his presidential campaign to go back to Washington was McCain’s attempt at flim-flamming Obama to show he thinks of “country first,” as McCain’s campaign slogan says. But McCain didn’t realize he was the victim of his own game of three-card monty.
He had been scheduled to appear on “The Late Show with David Letterman” Wednesday but cancelled, saying to Letterman the economy was “cratering” and that he had to rush back to Washington. As Letterman taped his show, replacing McCain with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, McCain was caught by Letterman doing a live interview down the street with Katie Couric, anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” “What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!” Letterman snapped.
The Commission on Presidential Debates said in a statement the debate will go on as planned. “The plans for this forum have been underway for more than a year and a half,” the commission said. “We believe the public will be well served by having all of the debates go forward as scheduled.”
Obama may end up debating against an empty chair. “We challenged Barack Obama to debate throughout the summer in 10 town hall meetings all over the country, and those went on as scheduled,” McCain spokesman Peter Feldman said to The Chronicle in an interview. “There were two chairs on stage there, so this is not like it’s unprecedented.”
President Bush offered to host a meeting with both candidates on Thursday, along with Congressional leaders, during a primetime speech Wednesday night; Obama agreed to the meeting-only at Bush’s request-in a statement from spokesman Bill Burton.
The joint statement took 16 hours to hash out, landing in reporters’ inboxes after midnight Wednesday, and it didn’t say anything substantive about the bailout. Despite both candidates trying to show leadership, neither could work together to do it. “No matter how this began, we all have a responsibility to work through it and restore confidence in our economy,” the statement said.