And screw Tom sticking in his own personal extra questions. Contrary to Brokaw’s belief, his opinion is not worth more than that of the “ordinary citizens” invited to observe the debate on stage and ask questions. And were those people drugged or threatened to render them docile enough for prime time? Or is that just Who We Are Now? Brokaw represents a tiny demographic of wealthy East Coast insiders. He is as out of touch with the pain and confusion of average people as the candidates are. He’s in the same bubble, floating above it all.

Where the hell is Howard Beale when we need him?

We needed Howard there on Tuesday night to divert these candidates from tossing canned chunks of their stump speeches at the audience. Understandably, after two years of non-stop campaigning, both men are exhausted. Neither one intends to expend an ounce more of thought or rhetoric than necessary. Like fighters in the late rounds, they are dazed. They just want it all to be over, even more than we do. Obama only raised his gloves – and his game – high enough to ward off the tired blows from the once mighty McCain.

But Obama on cruise control isn’t good enough. He needs to be prodded into new modes of thinking, not the old failed frames McCain continues to brag about mastering and Brokaw continues to ask about rescuing. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill are as sunken as Atlantis. We don’t need someone who can reach across the aisle, but across the globe. The days of Cold War bluster and parochial thinking are not just gone, but inimical to a rational world order that we can either help to shape or struggle to catch up with later.

McCain is a dinosaur. The earth still shakes and the hills shudder with his roars. But they are dying roars, from dying wars. It does no good to refight them now. We can’t do Us against Them anymore. We can’t afford it financially, morally or psychologically. It is time to take a leaf from Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” but in reverse, to build a new, inclusive social model from the rubble of the moral and economic meltdown that confronts us right now. You can almost hear the paradigm shifting. But we must not allow low forms of political life, the Bush-Cheney-McCain types, to act as the stewards of these new changes. The will only subvert them.

Frustrated, frightened American voters are ready for radical changes in the system that has now betrayed them. It is time to ask big, fundamental questions about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world we want to make. Barack Obama may or may not be capable of asking those questions and leading that more meaningful debate among his countrymen. John McCain is not. How do we get there from here? That’s what we need to ask. And demand an answer.

James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger 2006).

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