“Shouldn’t somebody in the media ask Obama why he was Fannie Mae’s favorite senator?”

Pelosi screwed up royally.  She is the Democratic Tom DeLay.  Newt Gingrich was an ideologue, but Tom DeLay was simply a partisan, most keenly interested in maximizing his party’s political power.  Pelosi cut a deal in which, as far as I can tell, every single Republican in a safe seat had to vote yes so that the Democrats could maximize their no votes.  Given that the Republican caucus is pretty much in open revolt, this was beyond moronic.  She then spent a week openly and repeatedly blaming the Republicans and the Bush administration for the current crisis.  The way she set things up, it was “Heads I win, tails you lose”:  vote for the deal and I’ll paint you as heartless reactionaries bailing out your fat cat friends.  If you’re going to do that, you’d better make sure you have some goddamn margin for error in your own party.  She didn’t.  Then she got up and delivered yet another speech blaming the Republicans for the bailout deal she was about to pass.

Being in power means that you get to give your party special favors on many occasions–but it also means that you, yes you, have the ultimate responsibility for getting things done.  She didn’t particularly try to bring her party in line, and so of course as soon as a few Republicans defected, hers stampeded.  The ultimate blame for this failure has to be laid at her feet.

–Megan McArdle.

This is useful. Note the first bullet point. It relates to the Community Reinvestment Act, which, along with other governmental failures, brought this crisis about.

Remember that the next time someone tells you that this crisis constitutes proof that free markets can’t be trusted.

Congressman Peter DeFazio (D. Or.) said that Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership always assumed that the bailout bill would pass. As a result, they failed to lean hard enough on people like DeFazio and other House Democrats who were allowed to vote “no” as a matter of conscience.

Once again, Nancy Pelosi & Co. couldn’t count votes within their own caucus, failed to understand that getting votes from the Republican Caucus would be difficult enough under ordinary circumstances, completely misread the mood of the House and failed to pass the bailout bill. As the majority party, the Democrats bear the responsibility for this failure. If the Speaker’s gavel is too heavy for Nancy Pelosi, she should give it to someone else and if the House Democrats can’t lead in a time of crisis, they ought to step aside and let someone else do the work.

From House Republican deputy whip Eric Cantor:

And I think that this is a case of a failure of Speaker Pelosi to listen not only to her members, but certainly to our members and the common bonds that brought our members together on this very, very important issue facing the american people.  This is not a partisan crisis.  This is an economic crisis facing everyone in this country.  And to look at the votes today, 94 Democrats voted no. 94.  Now, when we were in the Majority, I think we would make a decision that we would be able to come to the floor and bring a solution to the American people and pass it.  They made a decision to leave 94 of their votes off the table and, frankly, as you can see, a majority of our votes that wouldn’t go along.  Clearly this is an instance where you see Speaker Pelosi’s failure to listen, failure to lead.

Exactly right. Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership misread the mood of their caucus and the mood of the House. The bill failed as a consequence. Despite the fact that Democrats are in the majority, Pelosi & Co. can’t count votes correctly and can’t run Congress at a time of crisis. That’s why the bailout plan failed.

$630 billion has been injected into the private capital markets in order to restore any lost liquidity. Of course, this causes issues with the Fed’s balance sheet but it can sell Treasury securities to make up the difference. The stock market will still go down thanks to the failure of Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats in trying to pass a bailout plan but the Fed’s injection of cash–which is nearly as large as the bailout bill’s possible price tag–should keep people calmer than they would have been without the bill.

There is nothing in the rules of the House of Representatives that says that the Speaker of the House has to be a member of the House. After Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost the 1968 Presidential election, a lot of House liberals, upset with the leadership of then-Speaker John McCormack, approached Humphrey and asked him whether he would be willing to serve as Speaker. Art. I, Sec. 2 of the Constitution merely states that “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”

I wonder if we can get Ben Bernanke to take up the gavel in the House. Clearly, it is too heavy for Nancy Pelosi to bear it.

They can’t count within their own caucus. They have no sense of the mood of the House. They should have known that there was significant opposition to the bailout amongst House Republicans and they did nothing to make up for it in the slightest.

This House leadership team cannot function. It doesn’t know how to function. It cannot run the House. The country cannot afford to have any semblance of its destiny tied to the competence of the House Democratic Caucus since “competence” is an alien concept to Nancy Pelosi and her crew.

We have now seen that the American public and its elected Representatives in Congress are against socializing loss in the business community. Despite all of the artificial spin that this bill needed Republican votes to pass, it could have passed if a mere 10 Democrats changed their votes. Instead, nearly 100 decided to vote down the bailout.

It says something about the weakness of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker that she could not whip her members in line to support a bill that expands government and socializes a significant portion of the economy. I would have thought that this was a Democratic dream come true. And it was. And yet, Pelosi did not have the muscle to get the votes passed.

If the House leadership really wants to get this bill passed, they could steal a page from the playbook of former House Speaker Jim Wright, adjourn for the day, reconvene and call a new legislative day. Then they could try to pass the bill again and twist arms until it is done.

Dollars to donuts says, however, that this is not going to happen. Instead, House Democrats will try to blame Republicans for this bill failing when in fact, House Democrats have the majority and could pass the bill with a mere switch of 10 votes.

If House Democrats can’t govern, they should get out of the way and let House Republicans do it. Nancy Pelosi and her caucus just can’t do the job.

He is one of John McCain’s economic advisers. And he is probably the smartest economic adviser on either side of the partisan divide.

To wit.

Many of Barack Obama’s political opponents presume that Obama will be another Jimmy Carter but so many of those opponents miss some of the most salient portions of that comparison. Barack Obama is ridiculously self-confident in situations that would elicit humility from others. Obama’s major professional achievement after graduation from law school was the writing of his autobiography while working as a junior associate in a small Chicago law firm. He finagled a fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School to write his autobiography–when he was supposed to have been writing a more scholarly article concerning voting rights (the fellowship was originally given for that purpose, it was only later that Obama told people like then-Dean Douglas Baird that he was actually working on his autobiography).

Later on, Obama told Baird and Dan Fischel, who eventually became Dean of the Law School that he wanted to be a Senior Lecturer and negotiated a position for himself while at the same time, working as a state senator. To be sure, he wasn’t making all that much money and needed both jobs but for those who are unfamiliar with the law school at Chicago, Senior Lecturer positions are given to people like Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook. Posner and Easterbrook are, you know, judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and have major experience and major scholarly publications behind them. Posner in particular writes about as frequently as most people breathe. By contrast, other than an unsigned student note while on Law Review, Obama has issued no scholarly publications on any issue either as a law student, or as an attorney or as a Senior Lecturer.

It took a lot of nerve to put in the kind of request Obama put in. And even more amazingly, that request got granted.

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He scores it as a win for McCain:

There were no knockout blows in the first presidential debate of the fall, but John McCain outpointed Barack Obama often enough to encourage his followers that he can somehow overcome the odds and deny the Democrats the victory that has seemed to be in store for them.

It was a small thing, but I counted six times that Obama said that McCain was “absolutely right” about a point he had made. No McCain sentences began with a similar acknowledgment of his opponent’s wisdom, even though the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis far more than they disagreed.

That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator — an impression reinforced by Obama’s frequent glances in McCain’s direction and McCain’s studied indifference to his rival.

Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.

But it reinforced my impression that McCain was the more aggressive debater. He flung the adjectives that stick in a listener’s mind, calling Obama “naive” and therefore “dangerous.”

As Broder notes, McCain came to the knifefight with a gun in hand and was especially effective when discussing American policy towards Iran.

There is an awful lot of dishonesty and dirty campaigning going on in the dealings of the political class concerning negotiations about the bailout. See here. And here as well.

The people responsible for this dishonesty and dirty campaigning are now on the cusp of gaining tremendous amounts of control over the financial sector of the United States.

If that makes you sleep well at night, I applaud you for your stoicism. Of course, it could just be that you do not properly appreciate the dangers we might be facing.

Final agreement concerning bailout legislation for the financial sector has been reached. The details are spelled out here:

Top U.S. policymakers emerged from hours of tense negotiations just after midnight with a tentative agreement on a deal to bail out U.S. financial markets and began working Sunday morning to commit the legislation to paper.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D., Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D. Nev.) were flanked by key negotiators in the Capitol as they announced that a $700 billion plan to have Treasury buy up toxic assets had been all but finalized after days of exhausting negotiations involving members, staff and representatives from the Bush administration.

“I think we’re there,” an obviously tired Mr. Paulson said, a sentiment echoed in the statements of negotiators such as House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Senate Banking Committee head Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.).

Those present said the bailout plan still needs to be drafted in its final form, a process staff members were expected to continue throughout the night in what one aide called a “marathon drafting session” in Speaker Pelosi’s office just off the rotunda in the Capitol building. A formal announcement is scheduled for some time Sunday, though an exact time and location was not immediately available.

The distribution of the $700 billion that may be allocated for this bailout is as follows:

The $700 billion would be available in phases. The first $250 billion will be “immediately available” to the Treasury Secretary, and $100 billion available “upon report to Congress,” and $350 billion “available only upon Congressional action,” according to a summary from the office of House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), the No. 2 House Republican who was at negotiations.

Of course, the bill has changed substantially since it was first introduced as the Paulson-Bernanke bailout plan. A good side-by-side of the changes can be found here.

I am under no illusions that this bailout plan will pass. But it is wrong and I am against it.

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So in the debate, when John McCain pointed to a bracelet that he wears to commemorate the life of a fallen soldier in Iraq–and to symbolize his commitment to the mother of that soldier that he would make sure that troops returning from Iraq did so with honor and victorious–Barack Obama countered that he wore a bracelet too and that his bracelet-wearing was meant to honor the wish of the mother of a fallen soldier, who said that she didn’t want any other mothers to feel the way she did.

Two problems, however:

1. When you wear a bracelet that is meant to remember a fallen soldier, it helps if you, you know, remember the fallen soldier in question. Obama didn’t:

Obama wasn’t about to get left out of the patriotic symbolism.

“I’ve got a bracelet, too,” he said.

Then things seemed to go bad.

“From Sergeant . . .” he paused awkwardly as he fumbled through the layers of his suit jacket and shirt, looking for the bracelet with the soldier’s name.

“From the mother of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek,” Obama finally said.

There are people who are going on and on and on about John McCain’s supposed refusal to look Barack Obama in the eye during their debate, and how said refusal connotes fear of Obama The Alpha Male (yes, there really are people writing about this kind of thing). Seems to me, however, that Obama would have done better to make eye contact with his bracelet much earlier than he did, remember the name and avoid being accused of using a fallen soldier as a prop.

2. Thought I would forget about the second problem? Fear not, I haven’t. The second problem with Obama’s use of the bracelet is that the family that gave him the bracelet to wear, no longer wants Ryan Jopek to be brought up during the course of the campaign. Jake Tapper says that he wants to investigate this issue, but if it is indeed the case that Obama is advertising the name of a fallen soldier contrary to the wishes of that soldier’s family, then, to say the least, the Obama campaign has some ’splainin to do.

Get used to this kind of behavior. During an Obama Presidency, any semblance of dissent stands a strong likelihood of being met with threats and intimations of legal action against the dissenter, action taken in the name of the President of the United States. Unless I am mistaken, this is the very thing people accused George W. Bush of doing or wanting to do, no?

I would say that I eagerly await denunciations from all of those latter-day Emile Zolas concerning this blatant attempt to shut down speech merely because it may throw a monkey wrench into Barack Obama’s plans for upward political mobility. But Godot would show up faster. And he would bring friends.

Look, I can’t help it if others detected weakness and shakiness in the tenor of Barack Obama’s answers:

For most of the debate Friday night, Sen. Barack Obama was the one who presented himself as presidential and strong. And Sen. John McCain appeared to be the guy who was wavering.

Then came Iran.

That’s when Obama’s mouth dried up, and he appeared to be standing alone at that terrible border between presenting yourself as presidential and dealing with that knock on the door in the middle of the night, with the aide outside saying, “Mr. President, the planes are in the air.”

[. . .]

McCain hammered at Obama’s insistence that he would sit down with the crazed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. McCain said this proves Obama has demonstrated a dangerous naivete and a willingness to legitimize Ahmadinejad’s standing, even as the Iranian boss develops nukes and threatens to wipe Israel off the map.

“What Sen. Obama doesn’t seem to understand, when you sit down across the table from a person who has said Israel is a stinking corpse, it is not only naive, it is dangerous,” McCain said.

Obama protested, but not too much.

“So let me get this straight,” McCain said, still on the attack, “you sit down with Ahmadinejad and he says, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,’ and you say, ‘No, you’re not.’ Oh, please.”

Through it all, Obama appealed to Lehrer that he had something to say, and McCain kept pounding him to the body, and Lehrer said he had a question to ask, and Obama deferred. He let Lehrer change the subject.

It was a fine debating tactic, certainly a careful retreat from danger, but it is at such moments in debates where we learn the most about those who would lead.

To be sure, Kass noted good moments for Obama as well. But the discussion concerning Iran appeared to be the defining one for him.

Quoth the Democratic Presidential nominee:

“George Bush has dug us into a deep hole. John McCain was carrying the shovel. It’s going to take time to dig ourselves out,” Obama said to a rally attended by about 20,000 people.

The First Rule of Holes is as follows: When in one, stop digging. So, you know, “dig[ging] ourselves out” would actually be a bad idea.

Yet another judgment that McCain won:

My biggest problem with Obama is that he cedes almost all the emotional ground to McCain. For my money, the exchange that defined the debate was McCain sarcastically suggesting Obama would just tell Ahmadinejad “no” when he threatens to annihilate Israel. Obama tried to interrupt McCain several times during this mini-rant, then just kind of let the matter drop when he had a chance to respond. What he needed to do was look straight into the camera and inject a little emotion of his own. Something like, “Israel is one of our most loyal allies in the world. Their security is absolutely sacred to me. And if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or any other tin-pot dictator thinks he can threaten Israel in my presence or anywhere else, he’s in for a rude awakening. I would leave absolutely no doubt in his mind how we treat countries looking for fights with our allies.”

Sure, it wasn’t Dukakis whiffing on his wife’s hypothetical murder. But it was a missed opportunity to stand up both to McCain, who couldn’t stop sneering, and to potential adversaries. Obama missed similar opportunities all night long.

But he looked into McCain’s eyes! And McCain didn’t!

He seems to give it to McCain on points, though he doesn’t come out and say so. But from his telling, McCain’s outstanding moments during the debate far outnumbered Obama’s.

A clear win for McCain:

John McCain was very lucky that he decided to show up for the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., Friday night. Because he gave one of his strongest debate performances ever.

While Barack Obama repeatedly tried to link McCain to the very unpopular George W. Bush, Bush’s name will not be on the ballot in November and McCain’s will.

And McCain not only found a central theme but hit on it repeatedly. Obama is inexperienced, naïve, and just doesn’t understand things, McCain said.

Sure, McCain is a pretty old guy for a presidential candidate, but he showed the old guy did not mind mixing it up. He stood behind a lectern for 90 minutes without a break — you try that when you are 72 — and he not only gave as good as he got, he seemed to relish it more.

At least twice after sharp attacks by McCain, Obama seemed to look to moderator Jim Lehrer for help, saying to Lehrer, “Let’s move on.”

[. . .]

. . . McCain just pounded away on his central argument: Obama just didn’t “understand” how to deal with Pakistan; how dangerous it is to meet with foreign leaders without preconditions; how serious the Russian invasion of Georgia was; the price of failure in Iraq.

“He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t get it,” McCain said of Obama, also saying, “There is a little bit of naiveté here.”

It was as if McCain was paying Obama back for that moment in Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention when Obama said McCain would not serve America well, “not because John McCain doesn’t care; it’s because John McCain doesn’t get it.”

That last is for Obama supporters who were offended that McCain accused Obama of not getting it. Your man tried the same stunt. Sauce, goose, gander, etc. And note that while McCain’s “he just doesn’t understand/doesn’t get it” narrative rang loud and clear throughout the debate, there was no competing narrative from Obama.

Except, of course, for “I agree with John.” Or from time to time, “I agree with Senator McCain.” Gotta love the variety.