T his is the week Barack Obama, son of an erstwhile goat herder in Kenya and would-be first African American leader of an industrialized country, became the prohibitive favourite to be elected America's 44th president. Obama has opened a significant lead over John McCain in national polls and more crucially in key swing states.

The turning point was the current Wall Street meltdown, yet another potent symbol of public governance gone awry. The administration of George W. Bush, whose approval rating sank this week to a record low of 22 per cent, has been overtly in service to what Andrew Jackson called the "moneyed power." Still worse has been its studied incompetence that led to 9/11, the escape of Osama bin Laden, the phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, record budget deficits, the loss of New Orleans, and now the near-collapse of the global financial system.

Enough! It hardly matters – or perhaps isn't widely known – that most of the CEOs whose greed and recklessness will culminate in an estimated $2 trillion in losses from soured junk mortgages are long gone from the scene of the malfeasance, fired or retired before they could be fired. As Franklin Roosevelt said in the early days of a previous Wall Street crisis, "The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and incompetence, have admitted to their failure, and have abdicated."

Never mind. Tens of thousands of Americans deluged their members of Congress in an unruly protest against a proposed $700 billion bailout of "the fat cats on Wall Street" that was actually intended to keep America's already weakened economy from imploding altogether.

"To punish those at the top of Wall Street by destroying the system they manipulated will end up harming all the rest of us," Wall Street Journal columnist and professional investor James B. Stewart said in a cogent case favouring the bailout of financial firms holding mortgage-backed securities deeply devalued by the collapse of America's biggest-ever housing boom.

Still, Stewart acknowledged, "What I didn't grasp was the depth of this rage. Many are so angry that punishment is now their first – indeed, their only – priority." The rage is bipartisan. Americans whose wages have flatlined for two decades are bitter at having their tax dollars used in a rescue of the rulers of the exchange. And free-market apologists for anything-goes capitalism are dismayed at a massive government intervention in the private sector.

Main Street sentiment shifted somewhat with the sickening plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average following the Monday defeat in the U.S. House of Representatives of the proposed bailout package, with scores of both Democrats and Republicans voting against the Bush-sponsored rescue package. That one-day destruction of more than a trillion dollars in shareholder value put a crimp in enough retirement nest eggs to bring the threat of this epic crisis home to everyday Americans.

Yet it has been a colossal and preventable failure, one for which McCain is perceived as culpable because of his association with Bush and a long record of opposing the more sophisticated regulatory supervision by which America and the world could have avoided this unholy mess. Robert Reich, Clinton-era labour secretary and current Obama adviser, predicts "the absurdly wide gap that's opened up between the rich and everyone else" points to the beginning of an "Era of Angry Populism."

This is a political franchise that has traditionally belonged to the Democrats, but was deftly appropriated by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As momentous as an Obama victory Nov. 4 would be, the greater triumph would be the victor's success in reclaiming for Democrats that populist legacy.





David Olive's American Scene appears Saturdays in World & Comment.





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