So now John McCain wants to suspend his campaign and postpone Friday's debate so he can go to Washington and work on the financial crisis -- as if his vast economic expertise is what's missing in all of this.

After years of being the Senate's champion of deregulation, and an admitted economic lightweight, John McCain suddenly wants to pretend he's our knight in shining armor? But wait -- wasn't it McCain's own party and policies that created this crisis? Wasn't it his own economic advisor, Phil Gramm, who called Americans "whiners" in a "mental recession?" Didn't McCain recently praise the fundamentals of our economy and call himself a "fundamentally a deregulator?"

Come to think of it, the last thing America needs is for John McCain to go back to Washington. Because that's exactly where he and his cronies created this financial mess.

Clearly, Steve Schmidt thinks he's being clever. You can just picture the staff meeting: "We'll look like heroes! We'll put Obama in a corner, and force him into looking like he doesn't care about the crisis! We're geniuses!"