If John McCain decides not to show up tonight at the Presidential Debate in Mississippi, I'm not sure whether that's going to help him or hurt him in his race with Barack Obama.

If you leave the debate chair empty, it turns into a 90 minute interview for Obama, which isn't half bad, since a lot of TV's will click on at the appointed time just to see if McCain has decided to show up at the last minute.

And every newspaper in America will have a picture of Obama, Jim Lehrer and an empty chair with a sign that says "McCain" on it.

Is that really the best PR move you can make right now?  I'm not so sure.

The better move might be to go to the debate and kick the other guy's butt.  Or at least show up and try to do that.

Several of my colleagues were going to Oxford anyway to cover whatever happens today, though some others were diverted at the last minute over concerns that McCain might be a no-show.

If there is one thing that McCain has succeeded in doing - yet again- is that he has shaken up this race, for better or for worse.

Instead of a dull runup to the debate, he's put himself squarely in the middle of news coverage about the debate and the Wall Street bailout. 

(Whether he has helped himself is another argument entirely, but there is the old line about no PR is bad PR.)

In that sense, this race reminds me of Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama.  For much of that primary battle, Hillary was the aggressor, constantly putting Obama on the defensive, or at least making him react to what she was doing.

I'd love to get the inside skinny from the White House about how that Wall Street bailout meeting came together.  Was it done with "help" from the President, or did they all just stumble into that roll of the dice?

At this point in a campaign, I sort of doubt that it just "happened" by chance, but I sure don't have anything to prove it.

If I'm betting money at midnight Thursday night, it's going to be that McCain shows up, but it will take him some of Friday to finally admit that.

Stay tuned.