Watching how McCain has handled himself in the economic crisis has put his temperament front and center in the campaign. There’s no way to avoid it. McCain made it the issue himself:

McCain’s high-wire intervention in the financial crisis is his latest showstopper move – and his riskiest. He might succeed, but the candidate’s penchant for the dramatic has also raised anew potentially damaging questions of his age, executive abilities and, most of all, his temperament.

“He has been pretty erratic – there’s no other way to describe what we’ve seen out of this guy in the last week,” an Obama aide said of McCain’s conduct during the financial crisis.

Another Democratic official cited McCain’s “erratic, all over the map response to the economic crisis.”