Last year the G.O.P. pulled off two spectacular examples of bait-and-switch campaigning. Medicare, where the same people who screamed about death panels are now trying to dismantle the whole program, was the most obvious. But the same thing

happened with regard to financial reform.

As you may recall, Republicans ran hard against bank bailouts. Among other things, they managed to convince a plurality of voters that the deeply unpopular bailout legislation proposed and passed by the Bush administration was enacted on President Obama’s watch.

And now they’re doing everything they can to ensure that there will be even bigger bailouts in years to come.

What does it take to limit future bailouts? Declaring that we’ll never do it again is no answer: when financial turmoil strikes, standing aside while banks fall like dominoes isn’t an option. After all, that’s what policy makers did in 1931, and the resulting banking crisis turned a mere recession into the Great Depression.