There's no direct line to the Oval Office if you live in Glenrothes

I think I want a recount. America gets Barack Obama and we get greetings from Donald Trump. America gets its first black president. We get parliamentarians making contorted attempts to connect an epoch-making event with a by-election in Glenrothes.

For all I know, Scotland's invitation to visit is even now at the top of the president-elect's in-tray, but I can probably avoid breathing for four years. Should Mr Obama choose to accept, however, one hopes he will be spared Holyrood's answer to Jeffersonian rhetoric.

Iain Gray (Labour): "The First Minister is no Barack Obama. Indeed, the First Minister is less about the audacity of hope and more about the effrontery of hype".

Alex Salmond (SNP): "It's certainly true I'm no Barack Obama. The problem for Iain Gray is he's no Jack McConnell."

The American networks must have been buzzing after that exchange. Holyrood, with minds - OK: semi- sentience - elsewhere, barely managed the Zs.

At this point, I should probably urge our politicians not to bring things down to their level. For that, I would have to know where their level is. I thought we had got beyond the best wee preposterous analogies in the world. Instead, alleged Fife Council cuts were being mentioned yesterday in the same breath as the presidency of the United States.

Still, if you live in Glenrothes, you probably don't have a direct line to the Oval Office. Perhaps you merely hope that Scotland's politicians are waiting, on hold, to be connected with reality. This was tepid stuff, nevertheless.

Mr Gray was perorating away on Cuts, Labour, No Fear, Trust Me on That. Mr Salmond was riposting with a sub-Obama "Yes, We Cannae", intimating that education spending in Fife is up by 10%, and that any other cuts were illusory, Labour's, or of no account.

Annabel Goldie, Tory-not-Republican, then extracted a partial acknowledgement over the chance, just awarded in England, for NHS patients to buy drugs privately, with no loss of treatment rights.

Tavish Scott, a Liberal saluting "a very liberal democrat" named Obama, won the grudging admission that there is not a lot the First Minister can do about the HBOS-Lloyds shotgun marriage.

There was little cut, not much thrust. Mr Salmond told Ms Goldie, and he was not far wrong, prescription arrangements in Scotland were already "substantially superior" to the English version before London gave ground.

He then told Mr Scott, more or less, that 20,000 banking jobs are in the hands of the Treasury.

Scotland's government lacks the power to bother shareholders. "Would that we did," said the First Minister, wistfully.

Things are always a little odd in parliaments when people elsewhere are voting in the rain. No party leader wants to offer a hostage to fortune. The important fact yesterday was that no-one chose to boast, in advance, of a victory to come. The key, like the standard of jokes, was low.

A better picture of Scotland here and now came from the back benches.

Labour's Jackie Baillie asked for action on Lancet reports claiming that perhaps one-quarter of C diff cases are misdiagnosed. John Lamont requested action over the jobs catastrophe in the Borders textile trade. Christine Grahame wanted action on the consequences of Icelandic banking failures.

Action is always good. Mr Obama has become the most important man on this planet by promising that very thing. Mr Salmond, the most significant man on his own planet, would like to do the same. But chance, like a fresh Holyrood joke, would be a fine thing.

Parliament, government and First Minister don't have much actual power. Only people called Trump think otherwise.