The major media now suspects that McCain’s campaign ‘suspension’ – which took the world by surprise - was a bogus call. Beginning officially on Wednesday afternoon, the so-called suspension ended Friday afternoon.

On Wednesday, McCain called for a mutual suspension of campaign activities, saying that both he and Senator Obama should return to Washington to deal with this financial crisis that is brewing. In addition, McCain also added that he would prefer the debates be pushed back, as he would be in Washington at nine on a Friday night doing the people’s business. Obama, however, had dismissed both the calls for a suspension of the campaign and to the debate.

McCain campaign offices throughout the country remained open and active; his Obama-attacking surrogates were all over TV as usual. On Wednesday and Thursday, people in battleground states reported that they were seeing plenty of McCain ads. There was no way McCain could have emptied the airwaves of all his spots, because even with the best intentions, removing political ads is a ‘logistical nightmare’, as it involves nearly 300 TV stations in about 50 cities, each with different policies and technical capabilities.

Evan Tracey, who monitors political ad spending for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, said that on the first day of No Ads, the McCain campaign had pulled only 20-25% of their spots. “It certainly looked like they had previously been spending about $1 million a day on ads,” but by the end of Wednesday, McCain was still running “$750,000 or $800,000” worth of commercials. Only by Monday would it be clear how much the campaign spent on Thursday - the full day of the ‘time out’.

What McCain thinks he’s doing is anybody’s guess; but, it is believed that when he acts desperate like this, he gets a boost in the short term and then collapses in the long term. This is what might happen this time around too - it was very strange idea to make this ‘spontaneous’ call for bilateral suspensions. With Obama’s remark about

President having to ‘multi-task’, the question raised against McCain is - if he were to win, would he drop everything else he was supposed to do and deal with just one thing?

McCain’s campaign is acting more and more like a wounded animal that will bring down a generation of ‘top notch’ campaign operatives. His staffers evidently have screwed up his chances of winning the elections, despite the fact that he had a carefully constructed infrastructure.