John McCain has ducked debates before (in 2000)

(more of these here)

John McCain has ducked out of a scheduled debate before: think of the 2000 Republican Primary:

With new polls showing his campaign dead in the water among California Republicans, Arizona Sen. John McCain has pulled out of a long-scheduled debate with Texas Gov. George Bush, set for Thursday in Los Angeles.

McCain campaign officials tried desperately yesterday to put the best face on their withdrawal, even as a new Field Poll showed Bush far ahead among likely Republican voters in the winner-take-all race for the state’s 162 GOP delegates.

Sound familiar?

Of course, he is making excuses this time around:

The Arizona senator said he won’t show up for Friday’s presidential debate if no deal is reached on the government’s $700 billion bailout proposal, leading Democrats to accuse him of looking for a distraction.

“I think it shows that John McCain is becoming increasingly desperate in his campaign,” said Keith Boykin, a Democratic strategist and host of BET’s “My Two Cents.”

“It’s an indication that John McCain shoots from the hip — or more likely shoots from the lip — every time he speaks, and he’s not a guy who’s got the judgment to make decisions,” he said.

Conservative writer Matt Lewis called the notion that McCain is afraid to debate “laughable.”

“Everybody knows that John McCain is very, very good at actually taking tough questions. I think what we have seen here today and yesterday, though, is an example of a statesmen,” he said. “I think it’s ludicrous to say that by wanting to put politics aside, John McCain is somehow injecting politics into the debate.”

Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday accused the Republicans of looking for a “distraction.” Video Watch more on the fate of the debate »

“They don’t want to debate the issues with us,” he said Thursday in Louisville, Kentucky. “They don’t want to debate the issues … because they know they really literally don’t have a political leg to stand on.”

Of course, McCain has “suspended his campaign” while continuing to campaign:

John McCain shocked everyone with his announcement yesterday that he was “suspending” his campaign to deal with the financial crisis and he suggested there was simply no time for a debate with Obama.

But, what – exactly – did he “suspend”? His surrogates are all over television, attacking Obama. His campaign ads are still running and his Internet fundraising is still operational. McCain’s press crew is fully operational. He spent the day with Rick Davis, his lobbyist campaign manager. And all of his campaign offices are still open and fully operational.

And now comes word via Jonathan Martin at The Politico that McCain will spend the evening doing interviews on ABC, NBC, and CBS.

Sounds like the only thing John McCain wants to put on hold is the debate with Barack Obama. And who could blame him? He’s got a lot of explaining to do to the American people about how the GOP and their cronies got us into this mess.

So, how is the agreement going? Not so well, it seems.

Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, released a statement saying, “The president appreciates the bipartisan members of the congressional leadership and the two presidential candidates coming to the White House today to discuss how to finalize the financial rescue package. There is a clear sense of urgency and agreement on the need to stabilize the financial markets, and prevent a massive financial crisis from affecting everybody in America.”

The statement went on to say that the group will continue to work on a deal.

But according to Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, who attended the meeting, “we will not have a deal.”

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, who also attended the meeting, said Thursday that the meeting was contentious and blasted what he calls McCain’s inaction.

“I’m not quite sure what John McCain said at the meeting. He said something. … He had no indication he was for any particular plans. I don’t know where he is on all of this,” Dodd said.

The meeting included the following key players: Bush flanked at the table by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Obama and McCain on opposite ends of the table, House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also between the two presidential candidates and Vice President Dick Cheney across from Bush.

In a statement at the beginning of the meeting, Bush said he hopes for a deal to bail out Wall Street “very shortly.”

He said the nation is in a “serious economic crisis” that needs to be dealt with “as quickly as possible” and that the historic meeting is “an attempt to move the process forward.”

But according to several Republican aides, there is still major opposition to the “agreement on fundamental principles.”

What should we watch for? Robert Reich weighs in:

But the devil is in the details. From what I’ve heard, the kinds of limits being discussed could easily be cosmetic, such as limits on golden parachutes or limits on net increases in direct salaries during the duration of the bailout. Public equity could also vaporize into conditional warrants, giving taxpayers (and the Treasury) the option to cash in on certain classes of stock or applying only where firms get direct government aid rather than where they fob off their bad debts on the public.

There will be some skirmishing over whether homeowners in danger of losing their homes should be given some breaks, but here too it’s important to watch the details. Wall Street doesn’t want any provision that allows distressed homeowners to wiggle out of their mortgage obligations, even though Wall Street is wiggling out of its own bad debts.

Congress knows the public is furious. That’s why it’s insisting on the above-mentioned provisions. But Congress and the Administration, and Wall Street, also know that the public — and the media — can easily be hoodwinked into believing that certain limits and protections have been built into the deal when, on closer inspection, they haven’t. Wall Street is masterful at creating the appearances of value when there’s no value there, and many of our representatives in Congress are well-versed in the art of creating the appearances of public gains when the gains are mostly private. So the media has to dig hard and look at the details of this deal.
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