Obama’s crawfishing out of a Google/YouTube debate in New Orleans almost justifies putting Obama on the side of a bucket of boneless chicken.

Maybe Obama really doesn’t have any more answers than John McCain.

And yes, while it’s true that Obama and McCain should at least reserve time at the Commission on Presidential Debates to talk about Katrina & Rita recovery, this shouldn’t just be a conversation about Louisiana. It would be unimaginatively narrow-minded of Obama and McCain to think this is just an opportunity to talk about New Orleans. It should be a conversation about how New Orleans’ struggle is the same struggle the rest of the nation faces. Americans watched in horror as New Orleanians were rescued from rooftops because the federal levees failed in 2005, watched in astonishment as floods devastated towns across the Midwest this summer, and wondered if the United States could still call itself a first-world superpower when the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis last year. Americans would be justified to wonder when their turn is coming.

If the two major candidates can’t have a debate about investment in America’s decrepit infrastructure to protect Americans from disasters as well as to compete in a 21st-century economy, then who the hell do they think they’re talking to as they travel around the country. If the federally-constructed levees and other infrastructure is killing Americans, then we have more serious problems on our hands than fighting terrorism.

Imagine Obama saying he wouldn’t answer any questions about 9/11, or how to fight terrorism. It’d be game over. In the same way, if Obama isn’t willing to debate with McCain their plans for how to protect Americans from both natural and man-made disasters, he may not even be fit to sit in Congress. Maybe he should just stay in Chicago this fall and sit out the entire process.

Now, here in New Orleans, I’m scratching my head dumbfounded by Obama’s offshore oil-drilling flip flop. Sure, he’s gotta get elected before he can do anything to promote conservation. But we here in New Orleans are watching while engineers try to figure out how to pull a 798-ton barge out of the Mississippi’s powerful current, while the barge is still filled with possibly another 139,000 gallons of oil, and as the slow effort resumes to clean up another 420,000 gallons of oil spilled down the river. If they want to expand offshore oil drilling, Obama and McCain both need to come to New Orleans to explain who pays the environmental costs so that the rest of the land-locked nation can enjoy that oil off our shores. At the current pace of the oil cleanup, there’s a good chance that it will still be ongoing when they come to New Orleans to debate.

A debate in New Orleans should be about our nation’s energy policy, along with a bunch of other issues we’re trying to address in post-Katrina New Orleans, including affordable housing and homelessness, immigration, racial divisions and racial harmony, education reform, crime and criminal justice reform, ethics reform and attacking political corruption, climate change, health care, economic development, green building, civic participation and volunteerism, preserving our historic and cultural heritage, and so much more. The rest of the nation is having these conversations as well. Obama and McCain owe us an answer as to how they will address these issues if elected.

Obama and McCain can both afford to spend a day in New Orleans. There needs to be a substantive discussion about what’s at the bottom of many of our problems — how Ronald Reagan’s “the government is the problem” revolution, combined with his ramped up funding for “the military is the solution” revolution, and a relaxation of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, led to a debilitated infrastructure, inverted priorities, corporations privatizing more of their profits and socializing more of their costs, and the spilling of more blood and treasure to subsidize America’s voracious appetite for oil.

John McCain already said he’d “love to” debate in New Orleans.

So why can’t Barack Obama find time to debate in New Orleans?