Is the real intent of the suspension of the McCain campaign yesterday a ploy to delay or even cancel Sarah Palin’s vice presidential debate with Joe Biden next week? Why else would the campaign suddenly start negotiating the debate schedule, which has been set for months, by asserting that McCain will unilaterally cancel the first presidential debate tomorrow unless Congress and the Bush administration reach a deal on the Wall Street bailout plan?
If Palin is not ready to debate Joe Biden now, how can she be ready to be vice president in 40 days?
Late yesterday, after John McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to work on a deal to resolve the Wall Street crisis — despite the fact that he’d been absent from Congress for the 10 days or so since the crisis broke, and despite the fact that Capitol Hill negotiators were close to working out a deal without his input — his campaign operatives announced that McCain would skip the debate with Barack Obama tomorrow night if a deal had not been reached on the bailout plan.

Within hours, if not minutes, McCain aides then floated the idea of re-scheduling the debates around their own artificial delay by postponing the vice presidential debates, which had been scheduled for a week from today:

The McCain campaign told ABC News on Wednesday that John McCain wants to postpone Friday’s presidential debate until Thursday, Oct. 2.

The Arizona senator would like the vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, which is currently scheduled to take place on Thursday, Oct. 2 in St. Louis, Missouri, to be scheduled for a later unspecified date.

The details about what McCain is seeking, which were provided by a McCain aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity, came a few hours after the Republican presidential candidate announced that he was suspending campaigning so he could return to Washington, D.C., to try to forge a consensus on a financial bailout package.

The proposal to postpone Palin’s appearance was also floated by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of McCain’s close allies:

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Mississippi, currently slated to be the site of the first presidential faceoff this Friday.

In the 28 days since McCain named Palin as his vice presidential nominee, she has given just two interviews with legitimate journalists — ABC’s Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric of CBS — and the McCain campaign has been caught flat-footed several times in its efforts to shield her from public scrutiny, most recently on Tuesday at the UN. She has yet to hold a news conference.

By comparison, after Barack Obama named Joe Biden as his vice presidential nominee, Biden reportedly gave as many as 50 interviews with the press in the first week. Even Dan Quayle, the most under-qualified vice presidential nominee previous to Palin, gave dozens of interviews after he was chosen by George H.W. Bush in 1988.

If Sarah Palin is not ready now to hold her own with the press gaggle or one on one with, say, Larry King — and if she is not ready to debate Joe Biden next week — how can she be ready to be the vice president of the United States in 40 days, serving under a president who is 72 years old and whose health profile includes multiple recent bouts with cancer?