This ad from John McCain argues that Barack Obama is not ready to lead because on three or four occasions last night he agreed with John McCain.

Heckuva job, Johnnie.

Via OxyMoron. Needless to say, Wingnuttia is suitably impressed.

McCain runs this ad on Friday:

CNN Airs these poll numbers last night:

Who did the best job in the debate?

Barack Obama 51
John McCain 38

Who would better handle Iraq?

Barack Obama 52
John McCain 47

Who would better handle the economy?

Barack Obama 58
John McCain 37

CNN Runs this headline on Saturday: Round 1 in debates goes to Obama, poll says

Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.

CBS airs this story Friday Night: Poll Results Suggest More Uncommitted Voters Saw Obama As Debate Winner

Thirty-nine percent of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Barack Obama was the winner. Twenty-four percent thought John McCain won. Thirty-seven percent saw it as a draw.

Forty-six percent of uncommitted voters said their opinion of Obama got better tonight. Thirty-two percent said their opinion of McCain got better.

Sixty-six percent of uncommitted voters think Obama would make the right decisions about the economy. Forty-two percent think McCain would.

Forty-eight percent of these voters think Obama would make the right decisions about Iraq. Fifty-six percent think McCain would.

And FiveThirtyEight reports this snippet from the internals of the CBS Poll:

EDIT: The CBS poll of undecideds has more confirmatory detail. Obama went from a +18 on “understanding your needs and problems” before the debate to a +56 (!) afterward. And he went from a -9 on “prepared to be president” to a +21.

Hubris can really be a bitch.

According to a McCain ad running on the WSJ’s website today, hours before the debate even began.

Maybe what McCain meant when he claimed that he was going to “suspend his campaign” was “I’m going to suspend the Time-Space continuum” thereby permitting himself to view the results of the debate in advance. Pretty heady stuff for Mr. World Saver.

This Johnny McStraighttalk is a volatile guy. Yesterday, he wasn’t going to the debate, but pledged to stay in Washington until bipartisan legislation addressing financial failures was passed. No deal was reached, and McCain proved at best useless in reaching a consensus between the parties, and at worst injecting his political ambition into the negotiations contributed to a total breakdown after a deal had reportedly nearly been reached.

Now, he’s not only going to Mississippi without accomplishing a fucking thing in Washington and without “suspending” his campaign (despite his vows to the contrary), he’s also declaring victory in advance, like some kind of Conjurer or Crystal Ball Gazer.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that McCain will proclaim himself the winner tonight, no matter how indifferently he performs. More, he’ll run an ad that looks exactly like the one above! Then maybe he’ll “suspend” his campaign again, and go on 4 or 5 talk shows and talk about what a piker Obama is.

Via Atrios, while McCain accuses Obama of “doing nothing” he is un-busy establishing his bona fides for total legislative inertia on finance:

Republican presidential nominee John McCain has not introduced any banking or housing bills in the 110th Congress, while Democratic rival Barack Obama has proposed five.

Both candidates are traveling to Washington on Thursday to meet with President Bush and congressional leaders to build support for a massive rescue plan for the nation’s ailing economy.

Neither Sen. McCain (Ariz.) nor Sen. Obama (Ill.) sits on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which is taking the lead in the upper chamber of molding the bailout plan.

No wonder Sarah Palin had trouble identifying any pieces of financial regulation proposed by Senator McMaverick. They ain’t there.

Clearing through my inbox, I found this message from McCain Campaign Manager/Fannie Mae Lobbyist Extraordinaire Rick Davis dating back a week or so:

The First Debate

Team,

Last week, John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin gave two electrifying speeches at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota - the most watched convention speeches in history! Thousands of you attended McCain Nation convention-watching parties all across the country in support of our ticket and we thank you for your support.

We’re in the midst of a busy fall season with just over 50 days left until Election Day. The first presidential debate will be held Friday, September 26th, at the University of Mississippi. And after months of running away from John McCain’s joint town hall meeting invitations, Senator Obama will finally have to face John McCain one-on-one.

So Obama will have to face John McCain mano-a-mano at last!

Unless, of course, McCain decides he’s not ready and succeeds in weaseling out of the debate.

The Moderate Voice:

Ploy. Flailing. Cut and run. Stunt. Bizarre. Choking. Preemptive. Gimmicky. Brilliant. Retreat. Cowardly. Desperate. Surreal. Those are but a few of the words being used to describe McCain, but I think these sum it up best: Staggering cynicism.

From his metamorphosis from Mr. Clean to Mr. Dirty to his selection of Palin, cynicism has been the underlying theme of McCain’s run for the roses. It has inculcated nearly everything he has said and done since he became the last man standing after the Republican primaries, albeit the most elderly and addled.

There’s a line between “Maverick-y” and “erratic and unbalanced,” a line which McCain has crossed.

According to the Colorado Independent:

The regional spokesman for John McCain in Colorado accidentally sent the campaign’s internal talking points on the candidate’s plans to suspend his campaign to its entire Colorado media list, instead of a list of key volunteers, Wednesday afternoon, PolitickerCO’s Jeremy Pelzer report

The memo, titled “TALKING POINTS: SUSPENDING THE CAMPAIGN,” includes a list of points the campaign wants emphasized, and includes this warning from Kise: “Please do not proactively reach out to the media on this.”

McCain’s plans to stop campaigning — and a proposal to cancel Friday’s debate with Obama — had already been widely reported Wednesday afternoon.

But it gets better:

Told by a reporter that the e-mail had been sent to him and others in the media, Kise said, “F*ck, tell me I didn’t send it to the wrong list.”

Kise said the talking points were meant for McCain volunteers.

The putative Statesmen McCain trying to orchestrate spin for his self-described bipartisan gesture of supposedly “suspending” the campaign — through talking points his staffers are to deliver to the press in order to get favorable image.

You know you’re not ready for Prime Time when you get decleated by Katie Couric during an interview:

Couric: You’ve said, quote, “John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business.” Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the charge for more oversight?

Palin: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie - that, that’s paramount. That’s more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.

Couric: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

Palin: He’s also known as the maverick though, taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he’s been talking about - the need to reform government.

Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you’ve said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?

Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that is what America needs today.

Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Palin: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

What a fucking embarrassment. This is like losing a boxing match to Richard Simmons.

Here’s a video clip:

McCain, after announcing his intention to suspend campaigning due to the financial crisis, makes an unfortunate comparison:

McCain went on to compare the current crisis in the financial markets with the attacks of Sept. 11 and called on politicians to draw on the bipartisan spirit created during those times in order to solve the economic problems of the country today.

“Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis,” McCain said. “We must show that kind of patriotism now. Americans across our country lament the fact that partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.”

If I recall correctly, following September 11th, the Republican President and Republican Congressional leadership abused the spirit of patriotism and bipartisanship which followed the attack on America to ram the so-called “USA Patriot” Act through Congress, start a program of domestic spying about which we still do not know the extent, used a provision in the aforementioned Patriot Act to replace competent Justice Department officials with partisan political cronies, and manipulated the people and the Congress of the United States into approving a disastrous invasion of Iraq. Since that time they’ve used 9/11 and the enabling proclamation by Congress to use force in Iraq to rationalize the accretion of unprecedented powers to President Bush.

Comparing the current economic debacle to a national disaster which Republicans used to maim our Constitution and attempt to seize permanent unilateral control of our government, while rewarding political cronies with government jobs or no-bid contracts, is hardly reassuring. If experience is any guide, McCain intends to lay low for a while to try to repair political damage resulting from his repeatedly stuffing his Ferragamo loafers down his throat the last two weeks, and prepare a half-dozen ads blaming Obama for this market meltdown on some specious reasoning and false accusations, then come out with guns blazing and try to ratfuck Obama out of his current lead. One thing we can be certain of is that he’ll seek to use any situation, any situation at all, for political gain. The StraightTalk Express ran off the rail a long ways back.

As we’ve noted, McCain’s rhetoric of late has become increasingly disjointed and unhinged, and it is drawing attention from conservative commentator George Will:

McCain Loses His Head

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

~~~

To read the Journal’s details about the depths of McCain’s shallowness on the subject of Cox’s chairmanship, see “McCain’s Scapegoat” (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain’s characteristic accusation that Cox “has betrayed the public’s trust.”

In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and the New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

~~~

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

McCain’s reaction to Wall Street’s meltdown has been sheer buffoonery, more reminiscent of Keystone Kops than Senior Statesman. Last week he was in denial, claiming the fundamentals of the economy were sound — evidencing a complete disconnection with reality. Now, a short week later, after saying that as President he’d fire Cox — which the President lacks the authority to do — he rants about Wall Street corruption and greed in amorphous terms, says he’s going to reform the Washington Establishment he’s spent the last 26 years entrenching himself into, and then accuses Obama of lacking specifics. Specifics means more than “I was a POW for 5 years” and “I am a Reformer.”

McCain’s penchant for flying off the handle and making snap, uninformed and often dangerously wrong decisions was evident in another arena this week. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell refuted McCain’s claim that Georgia was blameless in setting off the tinderbox in Ossetia:

Now, in the current situation, the Russians acted brutally. I think they acted foolishly. But it was also absolutely predictable what the Russians would do. You could see them stacking up their troops.

And I think it was foolhardy on the part of President Saakashvili and the Georgian government to kick over this can, to light a match in a roomful of gas fumes.

SESNO: So you’re saying the Georgians provoked this?

POWELL: They did. I mean, there was a lot of reasons to have provocations in the area, but the match that started the conflagration was from the Georgian side.

AMANPOUR: And yet…

POWELL: And that’s a given.

AMANPOUR: And some debate in the presidential elections has basically been, “We are all Georgians now.” What does that mean? It’s the same as was said after 9/11.

POWELL: One candidate said that, and I’ll let the candidate explain it for himself.

But Powell seeming had some advice for McCain, advice that continues to go unheeded:

POWELL: No, the fact of the matter is that you — you have to be very careful in a situation like this not just to leap to one side or the other until you’ve taken a good analysis of the whole situation.

This was something that might have been avoided if people had looked at the Russian troops that were stacked up, if people had realized that the Russians were serious about South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and if perhaps more guidance and suggestions had been given to President Saakashvili beyond those that he received, it might have been avoided.

As he did in Georgia, this week McCain mistook activity for achievement, and confused haste with judgment. In an effort to appear on top of an informed about a situation where he was obviously clueless, he compounded his failure to keep apprised of the realities of the situation by making poor decisions.

McCain is reminiscent of our current President, Teh Decider, in more ways than one. Like Bush, he is quick to make bad decisions, and like Bush he is unlikely to ever admit those awful decisions were bad.