A month ago, Dr. John McCain, having trouble finding a pulse in his presidential campaign, administered shock treatment by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. The move got the campaign's heart pumping again.

Now, with the emerging financial crisis taking another toll on its heart rate, Dr. McCain has given his campaign pulse another jump-start by leaving the campaign trail and rushing back to Washington to save the day - for his election chances.

McCain's transparent self-injection into the critical negotiations between Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson and Congress over the gigantic $700 billion bailout was about as unwelcome to the earnest negotiators as a skunk at a tea party.

In this latest gambit, McCain got a hand from President Bush, who previously had hid behind Paulson in the effort to get Congress to swallow the indigestible pill. With Democratic nominee Barack Obama balking at interrupting the campaign, Bush settled the matter by making him an offer he obviously couldn't refuse — a White House meeting on the crisis.

The president also emerged from intensive care in the Oval Office for a rare prime-time television talk describing the financial crisis in the most dire terms to the folks on Main Street. They were having trouble seeing their self-interest in bailing out the Wall Street fat cats whose recklessness and inattention had caused the mess.

With Bush's credibility near rock bottom, the speech seemed a calculated part of the package to bolster McCain's own campaign rescue mission. It was the least the commander-in-chief could do for the man who had hung in with him on the war.

McCain sidekicks like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were quick to cast their champion's action as a demonstration of national leadership, including his bailout from the scheduled first televised debate with Obama. But what they saw as decisiveness, others saw as erratic and politically calculating, as well as insulting to the public's intelligence.

Obama argued that the financial crisis was just the sort of circumstance that warranted the debate's going forward. It would enable both candidates to present their views on what needed to be done before perhaps the largest television-viewing audience of the long campaign.

One of Obama's campaign mantras is the audacity of hope, but McCain's own brand of audacity is breathtaking in its chutzpah. Obama says it was he who initiated the idea of a bipartisan response to the crisis in a phone call to McCain. He says the call was suggested by conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, with whom Obama had previously done bipartisan business.

McCain agreed to putting out a joint statement on agreed principles for ending the crisis. According to Obama, McCain then suggested suspending the debate and returning to Washington. The next thing Obama knew, the McCain campaign had taken to television to disclose his unilateral decision to do so.

The transparency of the McCain campaign in these tactical moves is astonishingly blatant. An example is the manner in which running mate Palin has been trotted out as a show horse since the Republican convention, with tight reins on any exchanges with the news media.

The carefully arranged and monitored Palin exposure to a group of foreign leaders at the United Nations, with a sit-down with foreign-policy eminence grise Henry Kissinger, was a laughingly obvious effort to give a thin coat of expertise to her.

All this has come as polls were showing a precipitous slippage in McCain's strength since the surfacing of the Wall Street crisis. In less than a month, his narrow 49 percent to 47 percent edge over Obama in the Washington Post/ABC News poll had changed to an Obama lead of 52 percent to 43 for McCain.

For all of the Arizona senator's claim of bold leadership, an air of desperation now hovers over his campaign.

Reach Jules Witcover at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.