Gerard Baker | Oscars night without Hollywood moments | The debate in quotes |

John McCain was running out of time to halt Barack Obama’s gaining momentum today after their second presidential debate ended without a “game changing” moment for the Republican who is now fighting an increasingly uphill battle to persuade voters that he can fix America’s economic crisis.

With their third and last debate to follow next week, and less than a month until Election Day, Mr Obama hits the campaign trail today ahead in national polls and a slew of battleground states unscathed from their encounter in Nashville, and boosted by the economic crisis that a clear majority of Americans believe he is better able to handle.

The two candidates clashed on the economy, Iraq, Pakistan and Iran - and often found ways to criticize each other in a “town hall” setting where they fielded questions from ordinary voters - but it was a format that left the dynamic of the race unchanged.

Snap polls by US television networks awarded the debate to Obama. Such surveys are notoriously unreliable but the Democrat seemed as comfortable as his rival in the "town-hall" format on which Mr McCain has often thrived.

The task now facing Mr McCain, in the absence of a stunning unexpected event that changes the trajectory of the race, is to persuade enough swing voters that Mr Obama is a reckless, inexperienced and untrustworthy candidate.

His running mate, Sarah Palin, has been unleashed in the past 72 hours to make that argument, one that Mr McCain himself rolled out in a stinging speech in New Mexico on Monday in which he asked: “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

Yet in today’s debate he refrained from attacking Mr Obama for his past association with William Ayers, the Vietnam-era domestic bomber, who has been thrust front and centre this week by Mrs Palin and her repeated accusations that the Democrat has been “palling around with terrorists.” Such caution reflected the risk that attacks delivered on prime time television and before an audience of undecided voters only alienates them.

Mr Ayers, the unrepentant founder of the militant Weather Underground - but now a longtime Chicago education professor - held a political coming out party for Mr Obama when he ran for the Illinois state senate in the mid-1990s.

The overarching question today is whether the McCain campaign will start attacking Mr Obama over his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor whose incendiary remarks and behaviour threatened to derail his primary battle against Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this year, Mr McCain declared that such a tactic would be off limits, but in the past 24 hours Mrs Palin said in an interview that she believed it was a legitimate campaign subject. For the first time yesterday a senior McCain surrogate - Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor - appeared on several television networks to resurrect the Reverend Wright controversy.

Steve Schmidt, Mr McCain’s chief strategist, told The Times after the debate that the subject of Reverend Wright was something about which “millions of Americans” had opinions about. Yet he said it would be a decision for Mr McCain whether the campaign made it a major issue.

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