A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

With the country at one of its most interesting -- not to mention terrifying -- moments in a generation, John McCain and Barack Obama met in Nashville for what was surely one of the dullest and least satisfying presidential debates in memory.

There have been boring debates before, of course. Truth be told, probably only a fraction of these encounters, over the 32 years since general election debates became a fixture of presidential campaigns, actually delivered on their promise of great political drama. And even interesting debates are inevitably somewhat stilted affairs, as candidates cleave to their scripts and try to avoid blunders.

But the Belmont University showdown was something entirely different. Place the gravity of the moment next to the blah-blah-blah artifice of the rhetoric and overall insubstantiality of the evening, and this is what you get: The worst presidential debate ever.

The day after leaves behind a puzzle: How the hell did candidates manage to be so timid and uninspiring at a time when American troops are in two problematic wars, the world financial markets are in scary free fall and the Dow has lost 1,400 points since Oct. 1? This is a moment history rarely sees -- and both men blew it.

It was an odd reversal of the usual optics of power. Ordinarily, the national stage can take even life-size pols such as Michael Dukakis and imbue them with an outsize aura.

Tuesday's debate was a look through the wrong end of the telescope: Men with fascinating biographies seemed conventional. The promise both men once offered of a new, less contrived and more creative brand of politics was a distant memory.

Of course, there are arguments in the piece with which I disagree--it's funny how Sarah Palin's misstatements are concentrated on but Joe Biden's aren't; Biden misstated the role of the Vice President and the Constitution's treatment of the Vice President during the course of his debate with Sarah Palin and completely goofed up the history of Lebanon as well. Equally misguided is the argument that the reason this debate didn't go well had to do with the vapidity of the candidates' responses to questions. Here is a news flash: Candidates always give vapid responses to questions. They gave them in the previous Presidential and Vice Presidential debates as well.

The true problem with the most recent debate has to do with the fact that it constituted a faux effort to commune with the public. Townhall meetings are nothing of the kind. They are little more than sideshows that purportedly demonstrate efforts by politicians to reach out to the American people, but they never deliver in terms of authenticity or in terms of confronting the candidates with hard-hitting questions. The reason last night's debate was so unsatisfactory had to do with the fact that in a time of significance and importance, the format made the candidates talk down to people, rather than talk up to events.

No more townhalls. Please. We should be a more serious country than this.