While Americans are losing their homes in record numbers, the two bozos running for the President of the United States are throwing chairs at each other questioning which is the guy who best feels the pain of Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. Average American.

So much for the transformational election both Senators promised us.

“A chair is still a chair,” so to speak. Election 2008: politics as usual.

It all began Wednesday when Politico, the paper not-of-record published an interview with John McCain who when asked how many homes he and his wife Cindy own, answered after a brief thought, "I think — I'll have my staff get to you. It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you.”

Cindy, McCain’s wife, in fact owns a few homes. She has a couple of bucks. She became the chair of the now $300-million-a-year Hensley & Co. following her father's death. By 2007, she had an annual income of over $400,000 from Hensley & Co. and an estimated net worth of $100 million. She also owned at least $1 million worth of shares of Anheuser-Busch stock. With her children, she owns a minority stake in the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team.

Is it any wonder that Cindy McCain owns all those homes? I say Cindy, because it is she who owns the homes, not John; probably because she needs all that space just to stash all her loot, but I digress.

Back to McCain’s answer to Politico, and the Obama camps quick pounce on John McCain, seizing what they saw as an opportunity to show the public that McCain was the real elitist, not Obama, as McCain had accused Obama of being in his “celebrity” ads the week before.

"It's seven," the narrator says in the ad originally released to Matt Drudge, reminding McCain, and enlightening the voters how many properties the McCain’s own. "Seven houses."

“A room is still a room…”

The back became the forth when the McCain campaign quickly rebutted. MAC ain’t sitting back in the old rocking chair and letting the young upstart Obama best him.

Evoking the name of Antoin ''Tony'' Rezko, the recently convicted Chicago power broker who had raised money for Obama's campaigns and helped Obama with his own real estate-buying on the South Side of Chicago a few years back, McCain’s ad hit back hard.

"Barack Obama knows a lot about housing problems,'' the narrator of the stark new McCain ad states. ”One of his biggest fundraisers helped him buy his $1 million mansion, purchasing part of the property he couldn't afford... From Obama, Rezko got political favors... Now he's a convicted felon facing jail. That's a housing problem.'

Then this: Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?" asked McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

I heard that one and I almost fell off my chair laughing!

But really, it is no laughing matter when Americans become nothing more than game pieces in the Monopoly board of a presidential election. While the two candidates vie for the best house in the land, its citizens are going bankrupt. The titles they are losing are real paper, not part of a Hasbro toy.

But instead of dialogue about the real problems America faces we’re forced to watch the back and forth between the two candidates as they try and insulate themselves against attacks on their achievements, the American Dream we encourage our kids to aspire to in the first place. But it is a game for these candidates, isn’t it? And the object is for one to discredit the other, isn’t it? Long ago it stopped being about what really matters, bettering the lives of American’s and bettering America.

"A room is still a room even when there's nothing there but gloom."

So who is to blame for the low road our politics has taken us on? I’m not sure it’s the candidate's fault, or even the media’s. I think it’s American's fault for settling for this theater of the absurd our presidential campaigns have turned into.

Is it fun to watch? Yes, sometimes the gamesmanship is amusing. But at the end of the day, what are we left with? A pathetic situation in Iraq; a world that despises America; parents who can barely afford to feed their children; citizens who don’t have enough money to pay for their medical insurance, and empty houses on too many streets in America that used to be a family’s home.

George W. Bush got to live in that big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because Americans voted to give him the keys to the people’s house. Maybe if Americans had insisted the candidates in that election cycle talk issues instead of rhetoric, America wouldn’t be where it is today.

If Americans wants our country to remain the home of the free and the brave, maybe it’s time to stop being participants in this theater of the absurd and require that our candidates offer up real substance.

Or a pox on all our houses.