On the bailout bill's passage

That was a sad spectacle. I cheered when the back-bencher's rebellion wrecked the "leadership's bipartisan compromise."

Likewise, I mourn now that the "leadership" has put down the rebellion.

"Ah," you say, "but they had to be practical. Wall Street tanked after the bill failed Monday."

So, what did Wall Street do after the bill's passage Friday? See the above graph.

The Dow Jones was up for the day by about 1% of total value when voting began. It fell immediately (this is the 1:12 peak and drop on that chart) when the early numbers on the C-Span screens showed that the bill was heading to passage.

As the process dragged on, the index recovered, returning almost to the earlier intra-day high, by about 1:25 in the afternoon.

Then the finality of it, realization the mess HAD passed, and the index dropped dramatically. And kept dropping, so that it was in negative territory for the day by 2:30.

And well I'm on the subject, can we please retire the use of "Main Street" as a metonym for "the broader economy"? I'm tired of it, I suspect you dear reader are tired of it, and even the people who keep using it are likely tired of it.

As far as the broader economy is concerned, the bailout likely substitutes the scary prospect of a brief sharp panic (followed, as such a panic was in the period 2001-03, by a prompt recovery) for the scarier prospect of a very long period in the doldrums. A lost decade or more.

After all, what has the bill done? Will this money recapitalize and de-leverage the banks? No. As I read it, it will simply allow them to jigger their numbers and pretend that they've been recapitalized.

But pretending that they're making loans will be more difficult. Pretending that the loans are going to productive borrowers will be trickier still. The experience of Japan throughout the 1990s seems dispositive here.

Get ready for a brief and malaise-plagued Obama presidency, followed by the rise of a new hyper-conservative reaction. Get ready, in short, for President Huckabee after 2012.

Mike Huckabee again

I think, frankly, that it's refreshing to find a conservative Republican who can talk like this:

"You know, I've never hated the Clintons. I still don't, I have great respect for them. He made a lot of mistakes — a lot of personal ones — but you know something that I think should not be forgotten. There's two things about Bill Clinton I tell Republicans, it drives them nuts, but here it is.

"Number one, don't get it lost on you that a kid out of a very small, Southern rural state aspired to be President of the United States. This kid came from a dysfunctional family — alcoholic abusive father. And yet he didn't just aspire, he was elected president of the United States not once, but twice. That is an affirmation of the system. And it's a wonderful testament to give to every kid in America that no matter where you've come from, you've got an opportunity to do something extraordinary.

"The second thing, and this'll really wrangle, again, some of my Republican colleagues. Bill Clinton and Hillary went through some horrible experiences in their marriage, because of some of the reckless behavior that he has admitted he had. I'm not defending him on that — it's indefensible. But they kept their marriage together. And a lot of the Republicans who have condemned them, and who talk about their platform of family values, interestingly didn't keep their own families together."

Mike Huckabee

The old primary season in Presidential politics is dead. There was a time when casual readers of newspapers started following the campaign as the New Hampshire primary neared in February, and for a series of Tuesdays, lasting sometimes into June, the field of pretenders in each party, or at least the one without an incumbent, would be gradually winnowed to one nominee presumptive.

That's all dead because everybody wanted to be first. The primaries now will all take place at essentially the same time, which of course eliminates any winnowing value. The winnowing will take place before hand.

This, in turn, has meant that key events in our electoral calender are taking place now, and that the Ames straw poll among Republicans this weekend was one of them. I regret this everlasting-campaign, but I have no suggestion as to what to do about it.

Giuliani, McCain, and Fred Thompson sat this one out, though they each received some votes anyway. For the record, among the three well-known non-participants, the "winner" was Mr. Thompson, with 1.4% of the votes cast, or 203 votes.

Over-all, of course, the winner without quotation marks was Mitt Romney, with 31.6%, which is roughly what George W. Bush received eight years ago. But Romney's showing was no surprise, and it's the element of surprise that makes news.

The news coming out of Ames, accordingly, is the second-place showing of Mike Huckabee, with 18.1%. Here are all the numbers, with some analysis about the new hierarchy, if you will, or pecking order, this has established:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070813/cm_thenation/45222461