Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain (left), and his wife Cindy (second-left), join Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (right), and his wife Michelle (second-right) talking to audience members after the town hall-style presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on Tuesday. - AP

WASHINGTON (AP):

Republican John McCain, lagging in the polls, was unable to gain ground in the US presidential campaign in his second debate with Democrat Barack Obama.

With time running out - only four weeks remain until the November 4 election - and US and global financial institutions battered as badly as at any time in nearly eight decades, American voters appeared increasingly disinclined to put a Republican back in the White House, regardless of concerns about whether Obama, a first-term senator, has enough experience.

On a day when the US stock market continued its precipitous decline, falling yet another 5.1 per cent, the only new proposal McCain brought to voters in the Nashville, Tennessee, confrontation Tuesday night was $300 billion in additional government spending on sour mortgages - a not particularly well-defined federal intervention that was unlikely to have sat well with his conservative base.

Both candidates stood back from the vitriol that was consuming the campaign in the days leading up to the town-hall forum at Belmont University, which snap polls after the give and take showed Obama had won.

CNN/Opinion Research Corp put the debate in the Obama column by a margin of 54 per cent to 30 per cent. While 51 per cent of those polled said they had a favourable opinion of McCain, unchanged from before the debate started, 64 per cent said they had a favourable opinion of Obama, up 4 percentage points from before the debate.