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must reiterate though : With the suspension of the campaign better come the largest and most aggressive campaign offensive of modern times or the suspension will prove to be one of the biggest campaign blunders of all time.

McCain needs to be careful about this. Before the Wall Street mess hit, he was pulling ahead of Obama by appealing to Independents and swing voters while Palin was nailing down the GOP base. I would go right back to this strategy. If this is a base election like 2000 or 2004, McCain will lose. It's that simple. Obama himself is running mostly a base election (constantly throwing tofu to his rabid left wing base -- those people don't eat red meat) because he thinks that the Democratic base will be bigger than the Republican base and not enough Independents will go to McCain to make up the difference.

Here is the secret to the 2008 race: Obama is wrong about that. In 2004, the ratio of voters was 37D, 37R, and 26I. In the 2006 off-year election, it was 37D, 34R, and 29I. Note that the Democrats did not gain. Instead, several Republicans moved to Independent. And Rasmussen has recently stated that the trend from Rs to Is has continued in the next two years. This is why McCain has done as well with Independents as he has: more of them lean Republican than this group did four and two years ago.

So, if I'm the McCain camp, I would have McCain aggressively going after these Independents (as he was doing prior to the Wall Street meltdown), and have Palin doing the same with base GOP voters but in a manner that won't scare away the voters that McCain is going after. If he does that, McCain can win this election, perhaps by a larger margin than people might think. Among likely voters, there may be more Democrats than Republicans, but (as the 2004 election showed) there are more Republicans and right leaning Independents than Democrats and left-leaning Independents.