John McCain believes he can save the American economy just by showing up

McCain's announcements yesterday that he was suspending his campaign and that he wanted to reschedule the debate with Obama on Friday in order to deal with the economic crisis is puzzling for a bunch of reasons.

First, how does one suspend a campaign? Is he no longer taking donations? Is everyone working for the campaign taking the day off? Of course not... so the campaign suspension is in name only. But I'm not here to spend too much time on politics.

More puzzling is that he's doing all this so that he can go to D.C. to fix the economic crisis... but here's the really weird part. John McCain isn't on either Senate committee that is dealing with this mess—the Committee of Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs or the Finance Committee.

As any student of American politics can tell you, the work of Congress is done in committee. And without a seat at the table, McCain's influence is little. In other words, McCain is showing up to the party a few hours late and isn't bringing anything to drink on top of it.

This seems to me to be an obvious political ploy. Will it work? Time will tell, but it's a curious decision since it's highly unlikely McCain's input is needed (or wanted) to reach a deal.

From a policy stand point it's a dog and pony show... and McCain would better serve the country by not bringing any more distractions to an already tense situation.