Any consensus about this?
After McCain floated the idea of holding joint unmoderated townhall debates
across the country, Obama said it was a great idea.   Axelrod agreed with that today.
Is it?   One of McCain's apparent problems in the general is the money gap.   So in agreeing to do this, Obama's helping him compensate for a key inadequacy: giving McCain free exposure and publicity.
There's an interesting discussion on this `The Debatable Land` from Alex Massie who argues, inter alia :

"it's such a clever idea for McCain to
propose. In the first place it flatters Obama's already well-developed
sense of himself as a statesman cut from a higher grade of cloth than
that worn by other politicians these days. It appeals to his idea of
"elevating" politics too. Thirdly, and relatedly, it's easy to suspect
that Obama could be weary of having to play the "gotcha" game favoured
by the likes of Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and the rest of the
blowhards who moderate "traditional" debates and, consequently, that
he'd be open to anything that stymied their desire to referee the
contest.

But the excellence of the notion - from the McCain point of view - is that McCain wins even if Obama rejects the idea. The McCain campaign would then be able to claim, not altogether unreasonably, that "Barack Obama preaches the idea of a 'new politics' moving away from and beyond the 'tired old conventions of the past' but when he's given the opportunity to prove the seriousness of his intentions he ducks and runs and hides. He's just another politician more interested in playing the same old games."

What's the answer?   Do a few?   From one discussion I saw, the impression was given that McCain was entertaining the idea of the two of them travelling around the country together doing little but holding townhalls for the entire campaign process!