he format for last evening's pen-ultimate debate left much to be desired. It was supposed to have favored Sen. John McCain because he had used the modified Town Hall Meeting style event on dozens of occasion. It didn't favor either of them and, if anything, insured through its stylistic rigidity, a boring encounter. Overall it is the assessment of a majority of the pollsters findings, and my opinion also, that, if anything it was Barak Obama's night. He looked and sounded polished where Sen.McCain sounded weary and hardly inspiring.
The questions came from the studio audience, from hundreds of thousands of e-mails and from Tom Brokaw. Most of them sounded as if they were Tom Brokaw, the moderator's, invention.
How I wish the candidates could have thrown questions at each other and adhered to hardly any format and restrictions. What do you think? What concerns you? How would you handle it? This is why you are wrong! With the minimum of controls we would have heard and seen the maximum of response and the evening would not have dragged (at times) as if it were an endless awards show.
Sen. McCain does the financial crisis in which we find ourselves and which is, more and more, encompassing markets and societies around the globe, necessitate that we, here in the States, need more regulation?
Sen.Obama, Warren Buffett, a supporter of yours and a brilliantly successful man of business, believes that we are in danger of becoming, "a nation of sharecroppers". Is he correct? what does he mean by that and what can we do about it?
Sen.McCain, your follow-up please and do you support the appointment of a presidential commission to report as immediately as possible on the causes of the current crisis and give us opinions for regulatory reform.
A philosophic question for both of them. There is hardly anyone who would take issue with the idea that the 20th Century was America's; we, the world's only hyperpower. Whose century will be the 21st Century and what will make it so? More than a million people have already lost their homes during the past 2 years. In the following year it is anticipated that figure will grow by a further one million. What happens to confidence in the economy. John Stiglitz the oft-quoted 2001 Nobel prize recipient in economics asked the following, "When the current bailout of Wall Street fails to turn around the economy, will you propose another one". I wonder what the candidates would say. He added "Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson have said that what is needed is a restoration of confidence in the economy." Can you see what it will take to restore confidence?
And for the sixth session in a row, the marked dived again, today.