Democracy Fails a Test

Nancy Pelosi couldn’t resist the partisan attack just before the House of Representatives voted on the rescue of the American credit system.

She had to place the blame for the crisis on Bush, his cabinet, the Republican Party, the conservative philosophy and deregulation before the house acted. Enough Republicans took offense to kill the bill in the subsequent vote.

Why? Not because their feelings had been hurt, as Rep. Barney Frank so flippantly suggested, but because to vote aye would have been tantamount to endorsing Pelosi’s remarks about their own party, people and ideals. If it had been a Republican speaker making those remarks, he would have lost Democratic votes just as surely.

And thus the measure went down in defeat and 777 points were lost off the Dow Jones Index. Pelosi scored political points and God knows how many people on the cusp of retirement found their investments cruelly devalued and are now looking at one or two or five or ten more years of work before their retirement. So casually do our elected leaders play with the lives of the people.

The people, I am sure, blame the Republicans and the Democrats and the greedy Wall Street investment bankers for this crisis. The people, as usual, are right.

Personally, I am hugely disappointed that my faith in American democracy has been so misplaced. I honestly thought that working together as patriots, the Congress could craft legislation to solve this crisis quickly and move it to adoption in true bipartisan fashion.

Instead, our leaders have given us political theater. Somewhere in this mess may lie 20 years of power for a political party able to pin the blame on its rival. That has been the overriding mission on both sides. The disgust of the American people at these antics is pervasive.

If the credit system shuts down, it means a lot of short-term suffering for everyone until bankers, relying on the tried and true principles of lending and financing, find some capital they are willing to lend. Hopefully, that will happen before the economy is wrecked and we go into a depression that lasts decades and not just a few years.