Similarly, education is a pressing issue, and although both candidates mouthed platitudes about its importance — as in the phrase "schools'n'hospitals" — they simply refused to enunciate what they would really do. There has been a huge, debilitating teachers' strike in Chicago, yet both sides shied away from mentioning it. As America slips behind in the lower second division of the world's league tables for maths, science and languages, the last serious reform of its education system was the No Child Left Behind Act of over a decade ago. The reason the Democrats avoid the issue is because although everyone knows that the key to reform is schools' ability to sack bad teachers — which is presently next to impossible to do — the teachers' unions pay hundreds of millions to the Democrats each year. Nor do the Republicans want to alienate such a powerful body of opinion-formers as the nation's hundreds of thousands of teachers.

For all that the candidates discussed the overall size of America's national debt — and Mitt Romney produced some eye-watering numbers in the first debate on October 3 — there were virtually no specifics offered by either side about exactly which spending programmes were going to be cut in order to reduce it. Romney actually tried to justify this massive lacuna in his argument by explaining that it would weaken his negotiating position as president if anyone knew in advance. The truth is that it would have weakened his electoral treasure chest, and boosted Obama's, as soon as the special interest groups were informed of the budgets that the Republicans were intending to cut. 

Similarly, if President Obama had given so much as a whiff of which entitlement programmes he thought were sliceable — assuming he thought any were at all — it would have been a matter of moments before the relevant public sector unions started making the kind of criticisms that no politician likes to hear in an election year. "Obama and Romney will talk around the debt rather than about it," predicted Chris Cillizza, the talented political analyst who writes the ultimate insiders' blog, The Fix for the Washington Post, and he was right.

Despite the national debt at $15 trillion and rising, threatening to swamp the US budget in interest repayments by the end of the decade, neither candidate for president got into any kind of specifics about what they would do about it. Similarly, you'd have never guessed from this election that most economists are predicting that China's GDP will have overtaken that of the US around 2020. Democrats didn't want it mentioned in case Obama was blamed; Republicans didn't want to look like protectionists.

With the shooting of Congresswoman  Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011, a massacre in a Colorado cinema killing 12 people in July 2012, and the campaigns by Michael Bloomberg and Mayors Against Illegal Guns making headlines, the issue of gun control is another one that is being discussed everywhere in America, except on the hustings. Fifty-one per cent of Americans think their gun laws should be stricter, 39 per cent say they should remain as they are, while 7 per cent (mainly Appalachian hillbillies) believe that they should be made less strict, in a country where machine-gun ammunition can be ordered over the internet. Yet there was no way that the Democrats were about to adopt a position that the National Rifle Association could portray as weak or liberal to its members, who are widely represented in the rural swing states. Although the statistics suggest that around 48,000 American will be killed by guns during the next presidential term — i.e. 16 times the number who died on 9/11 — neither side thought it worth the risk of bringing it up much in the election. Stephen Barton, who was nearly killed in the Colorado shooting, made TV ads begging for the subject to be at least discussed in the domestic policy debate, but it wasn't mentioned once.