House and Senate Democrats are out to prove, that the political maneuvering around the bailout bill among the McCain and Obama campaigns, party leaderships, and the White House is more than a $700 billion game of chicken. Some form of Wall Street welfare relief seems set for delivery to the chambers by Friday.

I have to give credit to the McCain campaign, whether the gambit to abandon the hustings for the Senate cloakroom works or not, since, according to Marc Ambinder, the first televised presidential debate on foreign policy would include economics, hardly McCain’s favorite topic.

So, instead of listening to McCain do his grumpy man routine with the financial crisis, independent voters will hopefully get to see McCain, a pack of Republican senators huddled around him adoringly, at the microphones in the White House garden announcing how he’s saved the Republic and anointing Hank Paulson as his real vice-president. Meanwhile, Obama is back on the hustings boring lecturing the masses about the origins of the housing bubble. It sounds like a male adolescent fantasy in the form of a last-minute campaign staff brainstorm. Only McCain can broker a compromise and save a bad Paulson plan from the trash heap. Offering one’s services, as Obama did, is not enough. In the internet age, McCain has to be in the room.

Reading the transcript of a Byron York-Ruth Marcus exchange on the PBS Online Newshour and comments on Michael van der Galien’s “More On McCain’s Campaign Suspension”, two issues appear. Firstly, what does a president do in a crisis? Secondly, what is the proper response to this financial crisis?

Much has been made of McCain’s and Obama’s leadership styles. If one wrote a drama with two archetypal opposites, this campaign could provide the setting. One is “principled”, “pragmatic”, “light-handed”, “confident”; the other is resilient, an “open-door” manager, passionate, intuitive. One campaign rose steadily from obscurity to dethrone a front-runner; the other fell from its front-runner status, regrouped, and then recovered on the basis of a single decision. One eschews negativity and leaks; the other controls the news cycle and is gaffe-prone. John McCain appears to be the president who would always be in charge of the meeting, on the ground, on-site. Barack Obama would consider all options.

So, what is the proper response to the financial crisis? Wall Street’s problems started with bad policy, from the failure to junk Regulation Q in the 1970s to the Community Reinvestment Act. Interacting with over 30 years of episodic events, like recessions, bubbles, and stagflation, legislators never quite got a handle on a way to deal with globalization. A vicious circle of inept policy and currency crisis erupted in 1997 in Thailand, and didn’t end until the next year in Russia. Mexico defaulted. Anti-free trade sentiments waxed and waned. At the same time, the US treasury slowly implemented the Basel II Accords. There are four competing solutions to the current episode, and after that decision comes a slow process of reconstructing an entire financial system from scratch in the years available as financial entities deal with crippling debt. This is not the time for intuition. It’s time for dispassionate consideration of all options followed by painstaking coalition-building to produce a new legislative framework.

I am partial to Chris Bowers’ suggestion, that this process start without President Bush, but that might just be partisan pique talking. If that’s what President Bush has in mind, then I’m glad he realizes the next few years will be rough. And, that’s not because the world will collapse starting in ripples from Wall Street. That’s because every decision now starts an inevitable process of foreclosed possibilities never reopened even by the most charismatic of leaders. The next president and the next Congress are certain to make mistakes, and even perfect solutions have a short shelf life. Also, the American constitutional system is not prepared for continuities between regimes. It’s a jerky sort of contraption with ample shocks in the layers of federal, state, and local tiers. The Senate and SCOTUS stymie hasty judgments.

On one hand, a president should take charge during a crisis. But, given Congress’ many failings, a presidential candidate running to be a good executive shouldn’t obstruct it, or steal its air. John McCain’s campaign operates in permanent crisis, and he needs to handle one problem before he mishandles his role in a legislative process for which he is not temperamentally suited.

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