McCain: The riverboat gambler

Campaigns teach you important things about the candidates, and we're learning this about John McCain:

At heart, the former figher pilot is a riverboat gambler.

First came his pick of Sarah Palin, which delighted the GOP base, but flummoxed people so undeferential as to wonder whether governing a state whose outer island has a view of Russia's outer island really counts as foreign policy experience.

Now comes McCain's debate gambit, suspending his campaign and leaving Friday's debate up in the air to return to Washington to work on a solution to the country's financial crisis.

Despite McCain's attempt to portray this as an act of statesmanship, it is, of course, blatantly political.

Off-balance since the financial market meltdown started, and slipping behind in the polls as the public's attention turns to the urgency of financial and economic matters, McCain is trying to regain the momentum. This move is designed to show him as a man of action, one who, as his campaign slogan goes, puts country first.

Not everyone is buying, certainly.

"Oh, brother. What idiot came up with this stunt," former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards said on politico.com. "It ranks somewhere on the stupidity scale between plain silly and numbingly desperate."

Yikes. That's not something an enterprising candidate wants to hear from a fellow Republican.

But let's be fair: The McCain campaign has had some success with equally silly stunts before. Its transparent attempt to concoct an insult to Palin out of Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark seems to have fooled some people. Yes, they tend to be the same folks who are overjoyed to receive an email informing them that a distant relative has just passed away, leaving a large fortune that will be wired their way as soon as they provide their bank account information, but so what?

And certainly the debate move left Barack Obama's campaign struggling for the proper stance. Confident their man will do well standing on the stage with McCain, they're eager to debate.

Presidents, Obama told the press, perhaps a little plaintively, need to be able to deal with more than one thing at a time. And besides, both have big planes that could get them to Mississippi in plenty of time.

But the Democrat seemed uncertain. After all, who wants to look as though he'd prefer a gabfest to the nitty-gritty of government action?

Actually, the Green Party wouldn't mind.

"If John McCain wants to bow out, I'm willing to step in and take his podium on Friday," Green Party presidential nominee Cynthia McKinney said in a statement.

So, for that matter, is Libertarian candidate Bob Barr.

"Given Senator McCain's political stunt to avoid the debate, I ask that Friday's debate moves forward without him, as I am more than willing to step in to participate," he said in a statement of his own.

There are other possibilities, of course. When Joe Kennedy refused his challenge for a one-on-one debate in their 1986 congressional race, Jim Roosevelt ran what became known as the "Joe K Temper Tape," which showed the hotheaded young Kennedy delivering an angry dressing down to a local cable news interviewer.

Isn't there a John McCain temper tape out there somewhere?

No, that might seem churlish. But here's an idea. Palin has just had an excellent vice presidential adventure, meeting foreign leaders at the United Nations and receiving a foreign policy tutorial from Henry Kissinger. Why, now she's even taking reporters' questions.

So maybe she could debate McKinney and Barr. We could even invite Lyndon LaRouche - provided he's not needed in Washington to resolve this crisis, that is.

I doubt even "Saturday Night Live" could top that.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com.