Candidates fiddle while America burns

The presidential campaign plummeted into imbecilic tedium last night in Nashville as Barack Obama and John McCain faced off in the second debate. The encounter took place against the vivid backdrop of economic catastrophe, the obvious failure of the $700bn bail-out to turn the tide, Tuesday's market averages hurtling into the abyss, a paralysing credit freeze, the prospect of savage deflation and prolonged world depression.

Scant intimations of these disasters penetrated the walls of Belmont University's auditorium, where the Gallup polling organisation had mustered a crowd of 'independents', people canny enough to claim they hadn't yet made up their minds. The affair was billed as a 'town meeting', meaning only that the candidates were permitted to pace about, or walk up to their carefully

selected, ethnically and sexually balanced interlocutors in the crowd and praise them for the acuity of their questions.

It was as though the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, even though apprised that fire and brimstone had already consumed substantial portions of their cities, with prospective destruction of the remnant, spent a vainglorious 90 minutes vying with each other in proclaiming the fundamental soundness of their economy and the greatness of their civilisation.

McCain said he had a plan. He would require his Treasury Secretary to bail out beleaguered homeowners. Obama said he'd do the same. It's a sensible idea. A few days earlier both men had voted for a bankers' bail-out that explicitly does not rescue homeowners but exposes the defaulters to foreclosures superintended by the Treasury. The moderator, Tom Brokaw, could have swiftly asked them about this but he didn't.

McCain said he'd consider a spending freeze. Obama could have asked him whether this would include a freeze on the war