Here's a line (hat tip Western Confucian) from Guardian blogger Oliver Burkeman that pretty much sums up my first impression of McCain's call to suspend his campaign and postpone tomorrow's debate:

    Amen brother.

    Juan Cole also has an apt metaphor: McCain now realizes that he cannot win by conventional means and has gone totally over to guerrilla campaign strategy:

Mao Zedong announced the adage by which John McCain is clearly living
now: "The enemy advances, we retreat. / The enemy camps, we harass. /
The enemy tires, we attack." Mao was describing not a conventional but
a guerrilla war, and McCain is now unexpectedly playing the Filipino
insurgents of 1899 to Obama's America. Guerrilla wars are waged by the
weak but wily. McCain has all but announced that his conventional
campaign has crashed and burned. We do not know if the prepping for the
debate was a disaster, or it turns out you really can't let Palin be
interviewed freely by normal people, or whether terror set in that a
second great depression will turn the country starkly to the left for
the foreseeable future….
…
McCain thus threw off his stiff officer's uniform and donned the silky
black pyjamas of the guerrilla, beating a hasty retreat before the
Obama surge. The retreat was dressed up as a "suspension" of the
campaign and a "postponement" of the debate (a debate that would have
been McCain's Waterloo. Forced to debate a charismatic policy wonk on
top of economic issues on the very week of the financial meltdown, the
economically challenged McCain would have gone down flaming to decisive
defeat.

Thus McCain's Long March back to Washington and his suspension of a campaign he cannot win by conventional means.

     So let's think about this move strategically.  If it is a shift away from conventional to guerrilla campaign maneuvers, will it work?  Sun Tzu would say "probably not" because it seems like McCain, in his constant floundering of late, has given up completely on conventional campaign strategy and is employing only guerrilla-like tactics.  Sun Tzu suggests that "extraordinary" forces (read here: guerrilla) must always work in tandem with "normal" forces:

That the army is certain to sustain the enemy's attack without suffering defeat is due to operations of the extraordinary and the normal forces…

Generally, in battle, use the normal forces to engage; use the extraordinary to win. (5.3,5)

McCain is not engaging with the normal; he has thrown the normal aside and is completely improvising.  Relying solely on the extraordinary suggests a certain rashness.  He thus is violating another of Sun's tenets:

Therefore, the enlightened ruler is prudent and the good general is warned against rash action… (12.19).

It is hard to see how McCain wins this battle of the first debate.