How about some straight talk?

[UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers! Please come back tonight for my debate liveblog & livechat, starting at 8:00 PM EDT. Here's a preview of the setup. It'll be dorky fun for the whole family!

The livechat audience has skewed heavily pro-Obama in the first two debates, so InstaPundit readers could help provide some much-needed balance! :) I myself support Obama, but I always prefer to avoid the echo chamber effect. So come on over, and tell us bleeding-heart liberals what's what! Heh.]

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Amen:

The reeling economy almost certainly will dominate tonight's town hall debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. While the current crisis is understandably top of voters' minds, it's actually small beer compared with what America faces in a few years, when the federal government has to make good on its Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security promises to retiring baby boomers.

We're looking at a $53 trillion projected deficit – or $455,000 per household.

Anti-deficit crusaders Peter G. Peterson and David Walker went so far as to buy an ad in The New York Times, trying to rouse voters to the desperate need for entitlement reform, barely a blip on the campaign radar.

It is nothing short of appalling that both presidential candidates and their running mates have repeatedly ducked direct debate questions asking them to name specific spending cuts they would make in light of the $700 billion the bailout would add to the federal deficit. It is a dead certainty that the next president and Congress must look hard at taxing and spending priorities to deal with the debt disaster.

Voters should not be satisfied with evasive generalities from these candidates. Voters should demand that Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain level with them.

But with a putrid debate format that doesn't allow for follow-up questions -- from the questioning voters, from the "moderator," or from the candidates themselves -- how can anyone "demand" anything? Evasive generalities it is, then. And lots of irrelevant prattle from McCain about "pork" (which makes up less than 1% of the federal budget), and absurd unreality from Obama about how he'll still be able to pursue his entire domestic agenda (which he obviously won't). Argh. This is presidential politics in America -- fundamentally unserious, at a time of grave peril for the nation.

P.S. The unseriousness is partly our, the voters', fault, because although we say we want "straight talk," and although we say we hate negativity and personal attacks, we tend to rebel against politicians who tell us unpleasant truths, and we tend to make decisions based on the trivialities that attack ads generally focus on. But it's the politicians' fault, too (to say nothing of their political consultants), because they're catering to our worst impulses. Above all, what we need right now is leadership, which sometimes requires taking real political risks (not phony, stunt-like risks, a la McCain, but real risks, like telling voters things they don't want to hear) -- and there seems to be a total dearth of political leadership in this country right now, on both sides of the aisle. It isn't just that McCain and Obama are flawed candidates; it's that there aren't really any better alternatives. Who would you rather see up there? Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? John Edwards? Mike Huckabee? Joe Biden? Sarah Palin? Nancy Pelosi? John Boehner? Harry Reid? Mitch McConnell? George W. Bush? John Kerry? Dick Cheney? Al Gore? Please. Our political class is totally failing us, almost as much as we're failing ourselves.