Kristin Davis is a former madam who ran an escort service and brags that she provided prostitutes for New York's ex-governor Eliot Spitzer before he resigned in a call girl scandal.

The cheapening of political dialogue in the US is such that Madam Davis took the stage in an election debate last week as one of seven official candidates for Spitzer's old job. She suggested that her experience as a madam made her the candidate best prepared to reform the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that controls bus and subway lines in the Big Apple.

"The key difference between the MTA and my former escort agency is I operated one set of books and I offered on-time and reliable service," Madam Davis said to giddy applause.

Another fringe candidate, Jimmy McMillan (aka "Papa Smurf") got his name on the ballot as the candidate of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. The ex-karate teacher wore black gloves for "psychological" reasons during the debate and referred to himself in the third person.

Meanwhile, the Republican candidate Carl Paladino said he supported same-sex marriage, one week after telling an orthodox Jewish audience that children should not be "brainwashed" into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable.

Had I not lived in Beijing for the better part of the past year, I might have blotted out the New York gubernatorial debate as just another farce in the political merry-go-round that grips the US media's attention every two years.

Instead, I feel like a traveler from a strange land who returns home to find his own land even stranger.

It's not difficult now to understand what some Chinese citizens think of the democratic election model that US leaders want to graft onto the Chinese political system. What works for China is competence and efficiency, not this horrendous waste of campaign money.

"I'm not a witch," a female Senate candidate in Delaware announced in a multimillion dollar TV campaign ad, trying to downplay her youthful dabbling in witchcraft. Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell also believes in a "fundamentalist" version of sexual purity that condemns masturbation and would impose a ban on the world's cheapest date.

Meanwhile, a media barrage of campaign ads costing tens of millions of dollars is making China the scapegoat for all of America's problems. In one segment, a Democratic Senate candidate says of his Republican rival: "He's fighting for jobs. In China."

Reducing the complexities of international trade to a bumper sticker mentality reflects the view of bestselling author and columnist Thomas Friedman that the US is no longer able to do big things democratically that China does autocratically.

As a result, the US has fallen behind in high speed railways, electric cars, wind turbine energy, bioscience centers and a host of infrastructure projects generated by China's incredible growth engine.

In the same week that Premier Wen Jiabao was announcing China's next five-year plan, filled with forward-thinking infrastructure projects, the governor of my home state of New Jersey was pulling the plug on a much-needed rail tunnel project that would double the number of commuter trains to Manhattan.

Killing the tunnel is symbolic of how penny-pinching our politics have become, while a political hooker, a karate teacher and a witch are taken seriously.

Former Secretary of State George Schultz's warning still stands: "The light at the end of the tunnel may be a train coming at you from the other direction."

The author, an Emmy Award-winning TV news correspondent, was a copy editor with the Global Times. He now lives in New Jersey. forum@globaltimes.com.cn