Staging

This ought to be interesting:

Sen. John McCain will be in New York this Thursday, and he plans to attend the first of his proposed joint town hall meetings. Barack Obama will not be there. As of now, though, a McCain adviser says that two chairs will be on stage at Federal Hall, and one of them, presumably, will be empty.

Obviously, the McCain campaign is planning to cause Obama a little trouble by forcing the media to ask Obama why he isn't showing up. This will happen; Obama will almost certainly have to answer some persnickety questions.

The other thing that will happen is the McCain campaign will present the American people with an image of John McCain being stood up and presumably throwing a little fit about it. That archetype doesn't fit in with the strong leader motif most Republican campaigns aim for, including McCain's (however kitschy that effort is).

More bluntly, the McCain camp is risking an old man on the ice floe moment here, and worse, I'm not sure they know it.