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John McCain today accepted invitations from the Ronald Reagan and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential libraries to appear in joint town hall meetings with Barack Obama. “We are proud to accept the invitation from Mrs. Ronald Reagan, Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson to hold joint town hall meetings at the Ronald Reagan and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries,” the campaign said in a statement. “As Luci Baines Johnson said in her invitation, these meetings offer an opportunity to 'deliberate the great issues of our time.' The American people deserve a great debate about the future of our country, and we hope that Barack Obama will join us for these important events at these historic venues."

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis also has sent a letter to Obama manager David Plouffe, asking him to reconsider McCain’s original proposal to meet for ten town hall meetings between now and the conventions. Partial text:

Thank you for responding to our proposal. Just to reiterate, we have proposed at least ten joint town hall meetings once a week until the week before the Democratic Convention begins. As we understand your counter-proposal, you have proposed only one town hall meeting before the Democratic Convention.

In keeping with our original proposal, we are planning a joint town hall meeting in Minnesota next Thursday evening (June 19, 2008). We will hold time on our schedule for joint town halls every Thursday night until the Democratic convention. I hope Senator Obama would reconsider his position and agree to join Senator McCain as early as next week.

… However, at this moment, we fear that our negotiations over joint town hall meetings are turning into a debate about process. That is exactly what we have always hoped to avoid, and why we proposed a town hall format that would render many of these process issues moot. As Senator Obama has said, he is prepared to meet "anywhere, anytime" for a town hall.

We remain committed to this idea because joint town hall meetings offer the best format for presenting both candidates' visions for our country's future in a substantive way. We have a chance to change the way presidential elections are run and elevate the political dialogue. Americans deserve this kind of opportunity, and we hope that Senator Obama will join us at town hall meetings throughout the summer months.

Most all of our campaign rituals are rooted in some deep traditions of the nation’s past. Long before the mass-communicating age, candidates sometimes had to stand on tree stumps in order to be seen by crowds more than a few deep (hence the phrase, “stump speech). Today, Barack Obama’s words are amplified to tens of thousands of voters in huge arenas and millions more on television and the Internet.

Debates are a more fickle, and relatively recent, phenomenon. The Lincoln-Douglass debates are, of course, legendary and historic – but mostly for the way they crystallized the divide on slavery which was helping speed the country toward civil war. The first real presidential debate (Lincoln and Douglass were Senate candidates) would wait until the dawn of the television age in 1960 when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon faced one another on the same set. Three more presidential elections would pass before two presidential candidates met again – and it’s become a campaign staple since.

The Commission on Presidential Debates last fall announced the schedule for 2008, which encompasses three presidential debates and one for the vice presidential candidates, beginning on September 26th. But John McCain doesn’t want to wait that long and has invited Barack Obama to a series of as many as ten joint appearances at “town hall” meetings across the country. Obama’s campaign has signaled that they are willing to do something like it but have yet to commit to any specifics.

It’s easy to see why McCain would want such an arrangement. He appears much more comfortable in these settings, where he can stalk around the stage and interact with the audience. Even when faced with hostile questioners, McCain comes across as more natural than he does when seated on a stage taking questions from a moderator. It was after McCain shed his front-runner trappings (by necessity) and returned to town hall forums during the primary that he brought his campaign back from the near-dead.

Obama hasn’t done them as frequently as McCain but the 22 debates and thousands of appearances he’s done has certainly primed him for just about any forum. There’s no reason to think he would perform any worse in a joint town hall meeting. But even so, there may be a reluctance to give the opponent an opportunity to improve himself.

Should these events happen at all, especially in the numbers McCain has proposed, it would be a historic and unprecedented series. But here’s a thought: If proven to be popular among voters, it could also set the stage for an interesting situation in the fall push. It could allow McCain to propose a continuation of them as a substitute for the flat, staged televised debates proposed by the commission. And, unlikely though it may be, that would be a victory for McCain.