"Numbingly Desperate" "Gamble" "Transparent"

McCain is so infuriating. He can’t even just run a campaign on the issues. It's all about his handlers, warmed-over Bush staffers, positioning him as this, or positioning him to look presidential, or authoritative. Who are these guys? Who thought up the stunt to refuse to participate in the debate? In my opinion this just makes McCain look like he doesn’t know what to say, has no plan, and knows that he will lose the debate.
So, here is a wrap-up of some commentators:

"McCain's proposal to suspend campaigning was dismissed as "erratic," grandstanding and even "somewhere on the stupidity scale between plain silly and numbingly desperate" by former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards (Okla.)
Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post

John McCain is a gambler by nature, and the bet he placed Wednesday may be among the biggest of his political life.
Dan Balz, Wash. Post

But Harold Meyerson, in the Washington Postwins the prize with McCain's ploy was transparent
Slipping in the polls? Concerned that Americans may be paying more attention to the declining economy -- and even supporting economic regulation again -- than to your own stellar leadership abilities?
What's a Republican presidential nominee to do?
If you're named John McCain, the answer became apparent yesterday afternoon -- make the solution to the economic crisis all about you. Suspend your campaign. Pull out of tomorrow's debate -- Change the terms of the nation's economic discussion from the course we should take, and the defects of the laissez-faire model that got us here, to the indispensability of John McCain, leader of leaders.

But the McCain plan for victory this November never counted on Americans picking McCain on the basis of the issues,
As his strategists saw it, they had to confine the discussion to a comparison of the character of the two candidates. Alas for McCain, reality intruded over the past week, distracting the public from McCain's stellar attributes as a decisive leader with news of an impending economic collapse. So the task for his managers has been to diminish this new story to just one chapter in the ongoing saga of John McCain, the man who rides to the rescue.

Also see Meyerson's insightful
Wall Street's Just Deserts
During the late, lamented Wall Street boom, America's leading investment institutions were plenty bullish on China's economy, on exotic financial devices built atop millions of bad loans, and, above all -- judging by the unprecedented amount of wealth they showered on the Street -- on themselves. The last thing our financial community was bullish on was America -- that is, the America where the vast majority of Americans live and work.