The McCain campaign may have temporarily suspended its campaign, but the Obama campaign is still betting that Friday’s debates will take place.
Obama communications director Robert Gibbs told a room full of reporters this morning: “I believe the debates will happen as scheduled.”
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“I think the president of the United States is going to have to be able to do more than one thing at a time,” Gibbs said. “I think we can make significant progress on a series of [economic] principles that we’ve been talking about…and I think we can do both that and somehow end up in Oxford at 9pm on Friday night.” Gibbs called Obama “steadier as it relates to unexpected crises.”
“We’re prepared to take questions from Jim Lehrer with or without John McCain,” said Gibbs. When asked if the debate commission has informed the Obama campaign that the debate would continue without McCain, Gibbs said, “the commission has not talked to us in any way about changing what is planned to happen Friday at 9pm. … They have not made any plans for it not to happen. … The commission has said quite definitively — and Lord knows the University of Mississippi is certainly planning on it and has spent their money on it — that the debates will go on. We anticipate that the debates will go on.”
Although the Obama campaign has received some criticism for spending a significant chunk of time preparing for the debates in the midst of an economic crisis, Gibbs said that “the economy and the debate prep stuff is happening simultaneously.” The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that, “Democrat Barack Obama studied and practiced privately with aides in a Florida hotel Tuesday in the first of three days of intense preparations for his upcoming foreign policy debate with GOP rival John McCain.”
“I think a lot of what’s going to be asked on Friday night is what you read about in the paper,” Gibbs told reporters. “I don’t think there are going to be a lot of surprises.”
Friday’s debate will focus on foreign policy and Gibbs conceded that McCain would have “a decided advantage” going into the debate, given McCain’s frequent touting of his foreign policy credentials.
