Debate fails to rise to the occasion

“You know who voted against it? Me.”

Obama’s vision for energy was clearly an old school environmental message about taking personal responsibility to limit energy use in the home, rather than a message of securing endless supplies. “There is going to be the need for each and every one of us to start thinking about how we use energy,: he said.

Obama was also able to engage directly with McCain’s criticism about his lack of experience, and the notion that on foreign policy and defence, he lacks the necessary discernment. "It's true," Obama said. "There are some things I don't understand.”

“I don't understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, while Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are setting up base camps and safe havens to train terrorists to attack us. That was Senator McCain's judgment, and it was the wrong judgment.”

In closing, both candidates attempted to paint themselves as the right man for the job in tough times. There was little here to indicate that this stifled affair did anything to shift the election away from the direction it has been heading for the past weeks - progressively in Obama’s direction.

Outside several hundred students and local Democrat supporters lined the fences wearing T-shirts and bearing placards with slogans such as “Obama = Hope” and “Baracking for Obama”.

One woman wore a placard over her body with a photograph of her husband and the words “Bring my husband home from Iraq”. “A lot of us are here because we know that for many different reasons - America desperately needs change,” she said.