Brilliant Tactical Move?

In the national review, Byron York writes:

...when it was finally clear that there was going to be a debate at all, the Obama campaign sent an e-mail to reporters attempting to lower expectations for their man’s performance. Nobody paid much attention; it was, after all, an entirely unremarkable bit of pre-spin. But in this case, it turned out to be right.

Is it possible that the McCain campaign purposefully engineered the pre-debate conversation about whether there would be a debate to prevent the Obama campaign from being able to lower expectations? If so, the tactical and strategic brilliance of the McCain campaign is amazing.