The debates: what was missing?

(This is from Media Matters for America):

Time’s Massimo Calabresi found great significance in the fact that McCain and Obama didn’t talk about God during their debates:

In the nearly sixteen thousand words uttered last night in the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, one was noticeably absent: God.

[...]

Still, the fact that both Obama and McCain chose so assiduously not to invoke “God” in any form in any of their debates is noteworthy, not least to people who care about the presence of religion in politics. “Whether intentional or not the discussion of God and the role of faith appears to have been relegated to the Saddleback forum in this general election,” says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, who calls the development “troubling.”

Here’s the presidential oath of office, in its entirety:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Nothing about “God” in there. Turns out the president’s job is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” Given the way the current president has approached that job, you might think the Constitution would have been a big topic in the debates.

Well, in the three presidential debates, the only time the word “Constitution” was used was during a discussion of abortion during the final debate. That’s a continuation of what happened during the primaries, when the journalists moderating the Democratic and Republican debates all but ignored the Constitution, executive power, and civil liberties.

And yet Time thinks what was missing from the debates was discussion of God.