"What don't you know, and how will you learn it?"

LATimes columnist Rosa Brooks on the debate question:

"'What don't you know, and how will you learn it?"

When "Peggy from Amherst" submitted that question to Tom Brokaw, moderator of Tuesday night's presidential debate, she probably already knew she wasn't going to get a genuine answer from the candidates. And she didn't...

So I'll answer Peggy's question.

What McCain doesn't seem to know -- yet -- is that he's a dead man walking. He'll learn it definitively on Nov. 4, when he's going to lose the election -- and the polls increasingly suggest that he'll lose big. The GOP as a whole will also lose big. We're in the middle of an epochal shift in U.S. politics. A global economic crisis, two wars and an ongoing nuclear and terrorist threat have left most Americans disgusted by the recklessness of free marketeers and by unilateralist, militarist approaches to foreign policy.

The era of GOP dominance of U.S. politics is over. McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, wanted to be the Republican Party's "steady hand at the tiller." Now he's going down with the ship.

Let's get to Obama, who's almost certain to be our president.

What Obama doesn't know is how to keep the global economic crisis from sending all the rest of us to the bottom of the sea, right along with McCain and the GOP.

Obama won't say that, of course -- no sane politician would. On the contrary, Obama, like McCain, bent over backward during Tuesday's debate to reassure voters that all of our problems can be fixed. Neither he nor McCain made reference to the Dow's plunge of 508 points Tuesday, nor to the fact that the index has lost a full third of its value in a year. And when asked by Brokaw if the economy will get "much worse before it gets better," Obama's response was quick: 'No. I'm confident about the American economy.'

Really? I'm not.

I don't usually hope that politicians are being disingenuous. But if Obama truly thinks things won't get worse, then what he doesn't know is scary."

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