They say the most dangerous man is the one with nothing left to lose.  Enter John McCain.

McCain’s call to Barack Obama this week to suspend their campaigns and postpone Friday’s debate has been considered from every conceivable angle: Bold leadership or political pandering?  Crazy or brilliant?  Desperate or canny?

The truth, as in all such matters of political finessing, is that if it works, we’ll call it a masterstroke of genius.  If not, we’ll call it the last act of a desperate man.

By “works,” I mean in terms of arresting the freefall that McCain’s polling numbers have been in for the last week and change.  If it’s true that an object in motion tends to stay in motion until met with an opposing force, then McCain’s strategists can hardly be blamed for thinking that even an extreme and counterintuitive opposing force (We’ll campaign by NOT campaigning!) is worth trying at this point.

But my hunch is that any “bounce” McCain may or may not see in the polls falls into the category of ancillary benefits.  In other words, trying to win voters isn’t primarily why McCain is doing this.

The simple fact is that McCain now finds himself in a wholly untenable position.

John McCain is stuck between a rock and a hard place.  The rock is his party’s hardliners’ love of deregulation.  The hard place is the growing common sense of the American electorate.  Economic policy can be difficult to grasp, and there probably aren’t many people who can discuss the ins and outs of deregulation with a great deal of nuance. But most of us are realizing that if this “deregulation” stuff is what Bush and his cronies have been doing to the banking and investment system for the past eight years—well then, by God, it’s time we got rid of it.

We’re realizing the gross injustice of a situation in which we’re forced to pay—heavily—out of our own pockets to bail out a failing system, but are given virtually no say when it comes to how that system is run, even if it’s being run into the ground.

To put it another way, you may own a piece of land and the materials that you’ll use to build on that land, but you’ll still have to build in compliance with governmental fire codes.  This is because a) if your building burns down and takes an entire city block with it, it affects the whole community, and b) even if it’s only your own building that burns down, you’re still going to call a fire department that’s paid for out of the community’s taxpayer dollars.

You may find it cumbersome and frustrating to comply with fire codes.  But there’s a reason we aren’t having a vigorous public debate as to whether or not the government should impose fire safety regulations.  The only reason we’re having a public debate as to whether the government should impose banking safety regulations is because fire is easy to understand, while economics can be murky.

But some things are so catastrophic, they transcend murkiness.  Last week’s market meltdown is one of them.  Americans are realizing that a lot of fine talk about opposing “big government” and “socialism” lulled us into a complacency that allowed a select few to live the American Dream on a mega-scale, while the life savings of the rest of us were pillaged to finance it.  We’re thinking that if a business can go this spectacularly awry, the people running it can’t be fully trusted.  And we’re also thinking that if somebody wants us to give them $700 billion to save their business, we’re entitled to have some say in how that business is run.  And not just when it’s failing. 

Even McCain knows this.  He knows both the realities of the situation and the perceptions—increasingly synching up with reality—of the American voter.

The problem is that John McCain is the frontman of a party whose hard-core constituency is still firmly anti-regulation.  Witness what happened last week when McCain gave a speech, in front of his own supporters, that called for new/additional regulation of the banking industry.

They walked out.

And why shouldn’t they oppose additional regulations?  Regardless of what happens to the economic system as a whole, as individuals they still stand to profit far more without regulation than with it.

So what, exactly, is John McCain supposed to say during this Friday’s debate, assuming it proceeds?  To call, on a national stage, for additional banking regulation would not only cost him his most lucrative supporters (whose financial contributions are his campaign’s life blood), it might not even win him any undecideds this late in the game.  But to maintain the party line that banking deregulation is the best and only answer would surely be the final nail in his coffin.

Forget what I said earlier about the man with nothing to lose.  John McCain is a man with nothing to win.  And it doesn’t take a high-powered political strategist to realize that if there’s no way to win a game, it doesn’t pay to show up.