Some quick hits on McCain's recent move to pull out of Michigan:

JMart reports that Chuck Yob has issued a plea for McCain to reconsider:

"I talked to Michigan Republicans and McCain supporters on a conference call last night and they vowed to redouble their efforts," Yob wrote in a message this afternoon. "Indeed, there will still be a campaign for John McCain in Michigan whether it is sanctioned by the professionals in Washington DC or not."

Gordon Trowbridge and Deb Price of the Detroit News report that Michigan Dems are suspicious that McCain's move may be a bit of misdirection:

On the day after John McCain scratched Michigan from the battleground state list, Barack Obama's campaign said it would pretend the whole announcement never happened, Democrats wondered if it was all a trick, and Sarah Palin asked for a second chance to win over the state's voters.

"We're not going to be left flat-footed here," an Obama campaign source said Friday

Meanwhile, Susan Estrich analyzes the ramifications on McCain's move:

But make no mistake. Leaving a battleground state is a sign of weakness. Weakness in presidential politics begets more weakness. It hurts fundraising. It undermines confidence in the campaign. It ups the pressure on the candidate to take risks which are called that because they usually carry at least as big a downside potential as an upside risk.

There's also the fact that Michigan Republicans who are on the ballot this year and were counting on McCain to give them a boost at the top of the ticket feel abandoned:

"I don't know what McCain was thinking," fumed Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, a leading state Republican. "He's a general who left the battlefield in the middle of the fight.

"I'm disappointed in his behavior; he's thrown a lot of good Republican candidates under the bus."

Patterson said McCain's withdrawal is a blow to other GOP candidates in other races on the ballot. Presidential candidates are counted on to draw voters to the polls, and the appearance that one has given up could depress his party's voter turnout.

As I reported before the debate Thursday night in St. Louis, David Axelrod said he wasn't sure what to make of the move, but that they'd continue to fight on.

In the spin room after the debate, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe called the news about Michigan the "biggest thing" that's happened in the campaign to date. Plouffe pointed out that with Michigan off the table, McCain's path to 270 gets very narrow very quickly.

The McCain campaign's official line, which I got from a senior staffer on Thursday night, is that realistically they never had much of a chance in Michigan to begin with. They believed they had a chance to exploit Michigan's poor economy - which has consistently been the worst in the country - and lay the blame at the feet of the all Democratic leadership - from Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit to the two Democratic Senators to Governor Jennifer Granholm.

But the explosion of the national financial crisis blew away any state specific distinctions the McCain camp thought they could make. Having not used the only other arrow they felt they had in their quiver to make a run at Michigan - Mitt Romney as VP - the McCain campaign decided that given the current trend lines, spending additional resources in Michigan was simply not worth it.