Bipartisanship needed

The Times reports on the anger brewing among voters unhappy with the bailout:

At the same time, the lawmakers were under siege from angry constituents who had kept current with their own mortgage payments and now wondered why they were suddenly being stuck with the tab for a crisis set off by foreclosures.

“Like my colleagues, my phones have been ringing off the hook,” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, told the two architects of the bailout — Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke — at the banking committee session. “The sentiment from Ohioans about this proposal is universally negative. I count myself among the Ohioans who are angry.”

Even backers of the bailout were hardly enthusiastic. “Nobody wants to do this; nobody wants to be involved in this,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. “But I am going to argue that if we do nothing, we are jeopardizing our economy, jobs, people’s retirement security. Congress has to act and we have to act quickly.”

Given the circumstances and dire warnings of economic doom, the expectation remained that enough lawmakers would grit their teeth, hold their noses, screw up their courage and back some variation of the administration plan, a proposal Mr. Cheney privately told Republicans was a response to the worst economic situation he had seen.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said he expected that Congress would do the responsible thing and do it soon — though just how soon remained unclear. “Acting in the near term is important to stabilize the economy and to protect our taxpayers,” Mr. Hoyer said.

There is no way that the Democrats are going to go through with this bill if it winds up being a party-line vote. With just five weeks before an election, bi-partisan cover is going to be necessary to protect lawmakers in contested seats from the wrath of a public that is more attuned to the costs and the wrong-doing on Wall Street than it is to the highly complicated, but potentially catastrophic, consequences of inaction. Nobody likes the idea of handing out cash to Wall Street, but responsible leaders like Dodd, Frank and Boehner know that doing nothing is not an acceptable option when the possible consequences include a return to the Great Depression.