Twelve days ago, Republican John McCain had narrowed the gap between his campaign and that of Democrat Barack Obama. But his over-the-top and ineffectual reaction to the crisis on Wall Street created doubts in the minds of an increasing number of undecided voters. As a result, Mr. Obama has begun to pull away in the polls, particularly in voters’ assessment of which candidate is better equipped to deal with the economy.

So Mr. McCain had to prove his economic chops last night in Nashville, to come off as a combination of Franklin Roosevelt and investment guru Warren Buffett, a tough assignment for a conservative Republican — particularly in that, as Mr. McCain noted, Mr. Buffett supports Mr. Obama.

Mr. McCain was better on the economy last night, but not good enough to calm the doubts created by his 26-year record in Congress, his reputation as an opponent of government regulation and surely not good enough to overcome his inconsistent responses to the financial crisis.

His big surprise was to suggest that the government step in right away and take over troubled home mortgages. That option is contained in the $700 billion rescue plan signed into law Friday by President George W. Bush. But Mr. McCain would take the option out of it. “As president, I would order the Treasury secretary to buy up the bad home loan mortgages,” he said.

Alas, his first response to the questions about the economy that dominated the first hour of the 90-minute debate was to fall back his standard talking points: energy independence, low taxes and cutting government spending. As a cure for his ailing campaign, that wasn’t exactly pulling a rabbit from a hat.

Mr. McCain stressed his credentials as a reformer — but strangely, the word “maverick” hardly was heard. But he missed an opportunity, when asked by a audience member in the “town hall” format what kind of sacrifice he would demand from Americans, to point out his excellent record of support for national service. Instead, he said he would cut bureaucracy and earmarks.

Mr. Obama didn’t hit that one out of the park, either, talking about fuel-efficient cars and cutting down home energy use. Indeed, at a time of economic crisis, Americans may wonder why neither candidate was willing to inspire or challenge them.

For his part, Mr. Obama played it cautious, returning time and again to his plan to cut taxes for the middle class — the now-familiar “95 percent of working Americans.”
He scored his biggest point of the night in response to a question from moderator Tom Brokaw of NBC about whether health care was a “privilege a responsibility or a right.”

“Well, I think it should be a right for every American,” he said. “In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills — for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

Mr. McCain’s response that health care was a “responsibility” because “government mandates make me a little nervous” suggested that he may be out of touch with the realities of the middle class, as well as disconnected from the realities of contemporary American health care.

He’ll have one more chance, in the third and final debate next Wednesday, to prove he’s in touch. By then it may be too late. In Nashville, of all places, it wasn’t that he didn’t know the words to the song, but that he couldn’t hear the music.

Fear that Wall Street’s disease is infecting Main Street partly explains why the stock market has fallen 14 percent since the rescue plan was signed by President George W. Bush on Friday. That includes a 5 percent drop on Tuesday.
Sound companies are having trouble raising the short-term money they need to conduct routine day-to-day business. The Federal Reserve announced Tuesday that it would begin lending money directly to businesses through the commercial paper markets.
As important as a speedy response is, speed also can be the enemy of good judgment, and there are a lot of tough calls to be made. For example, Mr. Paulson can buy toxic securities from many kinds of financial institutions, or he can inject capital directly into them by buying preferred stock — essentially becoming a part-owner. Which approach he chooses probably will vary widely from situation to situation, requiring careful study and analysis.
Once the businesses’ balance sheets are repaired, panic should ease and credit should begin to flow. That’s the idea, anyway. But this anxiety attack has gone global, with European governments struggling piecemeal to save their own banks.
In America, the Treasury has to devise a system for buying toxic securities without any idea of what they’re really worth. There is no such thing as a market price for them because no one else will buy them. So the system Mr. Paulson constructs has to pay a price high enough to rescue the banks and other instutitions while protecting taxpayers from gigantic losses on doomed securities.

The Treasury plans to use so-called reverse auctions to set prices, buying them for as little as the sellers are willing to take. But these securities are so complex that often no one is sure what’s inside them, and each one is different from the next. Some very smart bankers may try to manipulate the system to push prices up. The Treasury must guard against this and publicly identify anyone who tries to beat the spread.
Congress was wise to attach some strings to the deal, such as restrictions on executive pay at financial institutions that participate in the rescue. That should help deter abuse. The government also can take ownership stakes in bailed-out companies.
With speed of the essence, the Treasury plans to hire private money management firms to handle the securities it acquires. But those private managers may well be associated with some of the very financial institutions that want the government to buy their bad securities. The potential for conflict of interest is obvious.
If the government gets the program right, it will cost the taxpayers far less than the $700 billion that Congress has authorized. It also will allow more homeowners to rework their mortgages and keep their homes.
But the devil is the details, and Mr. Paulson and his colleagues don’t have a lot of time to get the details right.

Caption:  President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

For those joining our debate live blog for the first time, everyone is invited — indeed, encouraged — to contribute thoughts by adding their comments to this post.

Pre-debate spin is focusing on “John McCain’s last stand.” The consensus of polls is that Barack Obama is widening his lead, anywhere from 6 to 8 points. McCain needs something tonight to stop the bleeding.

Two trivia questions to get things started:

1. What highly-ranked NCAA Division I basketball team lost to tiny Belmont in December 2003?

2. Name the 1975 movie in which a fictional presidential candidate named Hal Philip Walker played a key role, though he was never on screen. Who directed the movie?

Chief Dan Isom

Lt. Col. William Brown

Chief Ron Henderson

Today’s news story announcing the St. Louis Police Board’s appointment of Maj. Daniel Isom as chief of police observes that Isom and former Police Chief Ron Henderson “are married to sisters.”

That’s true — but there’s more to it. This is a story of one of St. Louis’ great police families.

The sisters are Virginia Isom and Peggy Henderson. A third sister, Sherry Beck, married Michael Beck, who retired as a police commander.

Their dad is the late William H. Brown.

William H. Brown spent 38 years as a member of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. He retired in 1988 as an assistant chief of police, and was the first African American to serve as the department’s chief of detectives — which means he commanded the department’s Bureau of Investigation.

Robert J. Baer, president of Metro, was head of the police board that appointed Brown chief of detectives in 1986. He remembers Brown as “a low-key, quality person,” a “strong, effective manager” who was “thoughtful and never grandstanded.”

Former Chief Henderson says Isom’s calm, low-key demeanor is much like that of their father in law.

But Henderson — who for many years lived upstairs from his in-laws — also noted it would a big mistake to see this as weakness.

“Even in my father in law’s retirement, he still was the colonel, who was pleased with our police work — but emphasized we had better be taking good care of his daughters.”

Andy Martin in a 2006 file photo

“I don’t pretend to be an exclusively fact-based reporter, though I try as hard as I can to get the facts.”

– Andy Martin

Suppose you were a television executive putting together a “documentary” on Democrat Barack Obama. Would you base a big part of your production on assertions made by Andy Martin?

Fox News Channel did on Sunday.

The program, aired as part of conservative commentator Sean Hannity’s “Hannity’s America,” was entitled “Barack and Friends: The history of radicalism.” It purported to provide “exclusive information, never revealed before, about (Mr. Obama’s) ties to controversial people and radical groups.” Sifting through the transcript, however, we found less new information than slurs and smears that have circulated anonymously on the Internet.

One of the program’s main sources was a perennial political candidate named Andy Martin. In 2006, when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Martin was among the first to claim that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim.

Mr. Martin’s campaigns — he has run for office as both a Republican and a Democrat, in Connecticut, Illinois and Florida — have been marked by bizarre allegations, barrages of e-mail press releases and frequent threats of litigation.

During Sunday evening’s prime time Fox telecast, Mr. Martin offered what he modestly described as his “expert opinion” that Mr. Obama was groomed to run for higher office by Bill Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground group who is now an education professor in Chicago.

Mr. Ayers is a big admirer of Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezeulan President Hugo Chavez, Mr. Martin claimed. “We are basically in the throes of a social revolution which attempts to essentially freeze out anyone who is not part of this radical ideology,” he said.

Based on Mr. Martin’s record, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of a man who was denied a law license, sanctioned by a federal court for filing frivolous lawsuits against people he thought had wronged him, and expressed virulent anti-Semitism.

When Mr. Martin ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the Chicago Tribune has reported, the name of his campaign committee included the phrase “to exterminate Jew power in America.”

In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he called a federal judge a “crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.” In a related filing, the Tribune reported, he expressed sympathy for Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust.

Although he graduated from the University of Illinois law school, Mr. Martin was denied a law license in 1973 because of “issues raised as to (Martin’s) mental stability.” Among them was his Selective Service record, showing that the man who then went by the name Anthony R. Martin-Trigona had “a moderately-severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Among the evidence cited to deny his admission to the bar was a petition filed by Mr. Martin asking that a parking ticket be thrown out because it was “entered by an insane judge,” and his description of an attorney as “shaking and tottering and drooling like an idiot.”

Mr. Martin has been sanctioned by a federal court for filing “vexatious, frivolous and scandalous” law suits. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said his frequent suits seemed designed to “harass persons who have unluckily crossed his path.”

During his 2006 campaign alone, Mr. Martin threatened to sue the Chicago Tribune for publishing a poll showing he had support from less than 1 percent of Republican voters. And he sued WBBM-Channel 2 in Chicago when it refused to include him in a televised debate.

It’s possible, of course, than even someone as deeply flawed as Andy Martin can be right on an issue. But the odds don’t favor it.

Responsible journalists would likely be as interested in Mr. Martin’s evidence as his spectacular charges. But not Fox News Channel. It’s Sunday’s broadcast was heavy on the innuendo and smear, light on the factual basis for charges made by Mr. Martin and other so-called experts.

That’s the way things used to work back in the day, when the late Sen. Joseph “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy used innuendo and smears to intimidate witnesses and cow the national press. Apparently, that’s still the way things work in Sean Hannity’s America.

The candidates evidently entered into the a lengthy memorandum of understanding on the details of tonight’s debate, which will be moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw and will be in a “town hall” format, in which individual voters from the audience will be permitted to pose questions to the candidates.

Some reports suggested that the candidates agreed that they would not be subjected to follow-up questions, but now comes a report that Tom Brokaw did not agree to any such restriction and that the candidates are prepared to take follow up questions from him.

It didn’t start yesterday with the latest slippage of the stock market. It didn’t start three weeks ago when the world’s credit markets started to freeze up and the investment banks collapsed, begging for help. It predates the submarining of subprime, the crooked corporations and the Enron accounting scams.

It’s not irrational, you’re not paranoid and you’re not alone.

You, me — all of us — are living closer and closer to the edge, even if we are earning more and living better than many of our fellow Americans. Our jobs are less secure, our investments are more precarious, our retirement prospects are iffier and the future we’ve been working toward, for ourselves and our families, has become murky and indistinct. The things we depend on for a sense of security in our personal and family lives don’t feel solid . . . because they’re not.

The so-called town-hall-forum format of tonight’s presidential debate in Nashville, Tenn., doesn’t lend itself to the discussion of such primal concerns. I’ll be surprised if either Barack Obama or John McCain goes beyond the more concrete issues of Wall Street voraciousness, bailouts, regulation and oversight and the infuriating but mostly diversionary matter of executive pay and parachutes.

In the campaign so far, Obama and running mate Joe Biden have come closer to the heart of things when they’ve talked about the American dream slipping beyond the reach of ordinary middle-class and working-class people. People who work in good faith with dedication, honesty, competence and even excellence may not be rewarded for their efforts. Obama’s line that the phrase “ownership society” really means you’re on your own is not just rhetoric and hyperbole.

For awhile, I thought it was me: the persistent aftereffects of having been laid off from my New York newspaper job three months after 9/11, my inability to forge a freelance writing career in the devastated New York media economy of 2002, my return home to St. Louis and the failure of my marriage in 2003.
Making big decisions and planning more than a few months ahead seemed beyond me. My mental list of what-ifs kept getting longer.

But it’s not just me. It turns out we have good reason to worry about the unpredictable what-ifs of day-to-day life: What if I lose my job? What if illness or injury strikes the family? What if there’s a tornado, a hurricane, a flood, a divorce? What if we can’t afford college? What if a depressed economy wipes out our savings?

The issue is not the odds of such things happening. It’s that if even one of them does, the impact is likely to be more potent and longer-lasting than ever before. And it’s that - in today’s America - there is less help available to get us through the hard times. That leaves all of us exposed to things beyond our control with little protection.

Nothing I’ve read better explains these fundamental contemporary American anxieties than “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives or American Families,” by Peter Gosselin, the national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Gosselin started researching, reporting and writing about the subject several years ago and produced a series of prize-winning newspaper stories.

The book builds on those stories - pursuing, amplifying and expanding the understanding of their themes and adding more details to the accounts of individual Americans from all economic levels who have experienced first-hand how the country has changed.

Gosselin acknowledges that Americans have been living better material lives, on average, over the last two or three decades. He notes, too, that by many standard measures - unemployment statistics, for example - problems have not been as bad as in previous economic slumps.

But Gosselin goes deeper than the standard measures, often devising new kinds of data developed with the assistance of respected veteran economists at such universities as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. What he discovers is that while incomes may be up, they also have become subject to wide, unpredictable swings from year to year. Upper-middle-class families may see swings of 25-30 percent; for lower-income families, the differences can be 50 percent or more.

That volatility disrupts people’s lives and makes it all but impossible for families to plan for the future. Not knowing what next year might bring makes ordinary decisions - buying a home, getting married, having children, moving to a different city, going back to school - leaps of faith.

People have been stripped, one historian tells Gosselin, of the “security of expectations.”
Consider health insurance, which has become more and more expensive and less and less comprehensive. Sick people who lose it are unlikely to get it back, although they’re the ones who need its protection from crushing medical bills the most.

Likewise, homeowners who suffer devastating losses - from fire, for instance - often find that their policies don’t provide the protection they thought they were paying for. Highly computerized risk assessments threaten to undermine the very purpose of pooling risk through insurance, which Gosselin credits as one of humanity’s greatest inventions and a powerful engine for economic development.

Meanwhile, pensions that once assured long-time workers of specific payments when they retired now are subject to the whims of the stock market. The new systems make the ridiculous assumption that ordinary people possess or will learn the skills of sophisticated investment portfolio management.

Finally, Gosselin rejects the notion that America’s reverence for individualism prohibits society and government from protecting people from some of the unpredictable risks of life. In one of the very earliest documents of the American experience, the Mayflower Compact, settlers from England agreed to forgo some rights as individuals for “the general good of the colony.” And 167 years later, the Founding Fathers declared that the purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Americans today did not decide to accept greater risk for the possibility of a greater reward. Americans did not choose to unravel the fabric of protections woven from the devastating experiences of the Great Depression. There was no debate and discussion about these things. They were imposed on us by the champions of unchecked market power, and the scale has swung wildly out of balance.

As a result, we and our families are more vulnerable to serious setbacks that we can’t control. Those setbacks are harder and harder to recover from - if we can recover at all. Whatever else you call that, it is not the American dream.

The stock market is a fickle beast. But lately it is reflecting increased concern that the nation is sinking deeper into recession and that no bailout plan can refloat it soon.
There’s plenty of reason for that worry. In America, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are coordinating a monumental effort to recapitalize ailing banks and shore up the financial system against waves of fear that threaten to dry up credit.
The concern has spread to Europe, where banks are beginning to shake and fall. The European Union has no equivalent of the Treasury Department to coordinate a bailout, so individual countries are scrambling to guarantee deposits in an effort to head off runs on their banks.
Trouble abroad could cut our exports and slow our factories, and exports have been one of the few bright spots in the American economy this year.
The banking debacle is a year old, but until recently it had had only a limited impact on the rest of the U.S. economy. In fact, the economy grew for the first six months of the year, and unemployment numbers were minor by the standards of past recessions.
Now that’s starting to change.

Auto companies saw sales drop 16 percent to 33 percent last month in the United States, largely because many buyers can’t get loans. “You saw one business after another postponing expansion plans, mainly because they can’t get financing,” says Joe Terril of Terril & Co, a wealth management firm in Des Peres.
That’s a surefire predictor of a significant recession, and the markets are reflecting it. The price of oil fell another $4.33 to $89.55 per barrel on Monday. Oil is now off nearly 40 percent from its high of last summer; traders are betting that a suffering economy will lessen demand.
Another big indicator of recession: last week’s report that 159,000 Americans lost jobs in September.

The Fed and Treasury have taken unprecedented steps to halt the panic. The Fed is pumping billions into the credit system to stop it from seizing up, and the Treasury has embarked on a direct bailout of banks.
So far Wall Street is not impressed. The bad economic news has lessened the risk of inflation, and the Fed should consider a cut in short-term interest rates. But at this point, nothing may prevent a significant recession.

Not so when it comes to mental health. Policies often strictly limited the number of days a patient could be hospitalized for psychiatric care. Even if all parties agreed that a seriously mentally ill patient required continued inpatient care, the patient may have been discharged because the insurance company no longer would pay.
Psychiatric patients have committed suicide after being discharged like that. It’s impossible to imagine a heart patient at risk of sudden cardiac death being turned out of a hospital under similar circumstances.
Insurance companies also often have made patients pay a larger share of the bill for mental health treatment, and they have charged higher co-payments for seeing a psychiatrist or therapist than for seeing a family doctor.
Those limits have been based on an outmoded dualism that sees mental illness as distinct from physical sickness.

The reasoning behind this view was that physical illness and the treatments prescribed are objectively verifiable, while psychiatric illness and its treatments are more subjective and subject to abuse.
Opponents of providing equal coverage for mental and physical illness — sometimes called mental health parity — have raised the specter of people with relatively minor emotional symptoms suddenly being entitled to an unlimited number of therapy sessions.
That’s not what has happened in states such as Missouri, which already has  a mental health parity law on the books. Those laws have added only modestly to increases in health insurance premiums. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the parity requirement in the bill approved last week will increase premiums by an average of two-tenths of 1 percent.
Business groups, which were among initial opponents to parity laws, have found that modest premium increases have paid off in higher productivity in states with such laws. But state laws don’t apply to millions of Americans whose health insurance is governed by federal law.
In the nearly 15 years since advocates first proposed mental health parity laws, scientific discoveries have begun to show the biological basis of many serious mental illnesses. That has undercut further the justification for separate treatment limits and higher deductibles for mental health care.
Allowing such distinctions in the face of such overwhelming evidence only stigmatized those with mental illness and prevented thousands of seriously ill people from getting the care they needed. The change in federal law enacted last week will correct this injustice.

Post-Dispatch illustration by John Shew

A Saturday New York Times story looked at the relationship (or lack thereof) between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, the founder of the 60s radical group the Weather Underground. Sarah Palin picked up on it and hammered away in Florida.

And Barack Obama is reminding voters of John McCain’s role as one of the Keating Five.

Meanwhile, the Dow slides below 10,000. And things are no better in Europe. Experts predict a global economic contraction.

The conflict between Russia and Georgia continues.

Geez.

At least we have the second presidential debate Tuesday to take our minds off things. We’ll be blogging live again tomorrow night. I hope you’ll join us (with your laptops fully juiced).

What would you have us ask him?

(Pictured: Five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, shown in his Washington campaign office. Washington Post photo by Lois Raimondo.)

The existing Medicare prescription drug benefit was designed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2003 to be available only through private insurance companies. The theory was that the more choices available, the greater the competition would be and, in turn, the lower the prices.
At first, things seemed to work that way. When the prescription benefit started operating in 2006, there were stand-alone drug plans available for less than $2 a month. Since then, however, prices have soared. For example, Avalere calculated that one national plan, Humana PDP Enhanced, has hiked its premiums by 329 percent.
Medicare’s open enrollment period, during which eligible Americans must choose a plan to cover them next year, began last week. It promises to be a daunting challenge.
Elderly and disabled people will have to choose from one of the 47 stand-alone drug plans offered in Missouri, somewhat fewer than the 53 available this year. In Illinois, they must select from the 49 available plans, down from 55 last year.
Each plan has a different list of drugs that it covers; a different schedule of deductibles and different coverage for the so-called doughnut hole — the coverage gap of $2,850 that is built into Medicare Part D.
Most Missouri plans offer no provisions to cover the doughnut hole gap. Some cover only “preferred” generic drugs. None covers brand-name drugs, yet some branded drugs are not available in generic form. That means some elderly Americans will discover that they’re paying for drug insurance that is useless when it comes to the drugs they must take to preserve their health.

To make the best possible choices among the available prescription drug insurance plans, eligible beneficiaries would need to know not only which drugs they use now, but also which other drugs their doctors are likely to prescribe for them in the coming year.
Another alternative is so-called Medicare Advantage plans — comprehensive health-insurance plans, some of which include prescription drug coverage. In Missouri, for example, each county has a different assortment of plans available. Add the various county options together, and you wind up with a total of 3,540 Medicare Advantage plans in Missouri, including 50 each in St. Louis and St. Louis County. Such a dizzying array can be overwhelming even to experienced consumers, to say nothing of people who may never have tackled such a task before.
It may sound heretical to say it, but there comes a point at which having too much choice actually is a bad thing.

drug benefit’s faulty design leaves the government unable to use the power of mass purchasing to get the best possible prices for the elderly and disabled — and save taxpayers money. It means that many people will end up in drug plans that don’t cover the drugs they need or cost more than they might have paid otherwise.
It also means that in a year in which group health insurance premiums are increasing by an average of 5 percent nationally, the elderly and infirm will be looking at premium increases averaging 24 percent nationwide and 18 percent in Missouri and Illinois.
That’s a great deal for private insurance companies, but it’s a terrible deal for the people Medicare is supposed to serve.

A sleeper issue, Proposition M has been caught up in a debate about failed lawsuits and allegations about improper financial management at Metro. In fact, it is an economic development issue. If you think the sale of Anheuser-Busch or the closing of the Chrysler plant was a problem for St. Louis, wait’ll you see what happens if Prop M fails.

Simply put, the outcome of the sales tax vote will influence whether St. Louis remains competitive among metropolitan regions that are trying to attract top talent, top jobs and other economic opportunities.

Dynamic public transportation — systems that are smart, efficient and convenient — is a key indicator of a community’s confidence and vibrancy. Our region has made major strides toward creating such a system with its $1.4 billion investment (bus and rail) over the past decade. But many voters still need to know what’s in it for them.

Only 8 percent of county residents tell pollsters they regularly ride the Metro system. Forty-five percent say they use the system for special events. The rest never get on a bus or train. Why should they pay a nickel more in taxes for every $10 they spend?

The answer: Because the people of our community who do use and depend on the transit system are an essential cog in the local economy on which all of us depend. They’re the men and women who keep our hospitals and nursing homes operating; the people who cook the food, serve the meals, bus the tables and wash the dishes in the restaurants we patronize; the people who help find us shoes and cell phones and hammers and baby clothes in thousands of retail stories, and countless other businesses large and small.

Without public transit, many couldn’t get to work. Without public transit, the worlds of many elderly or disabled transit riders would shrink. Ask not for whom the buses and trains run; one way or another, in an era of $4-a-gallon gasoline, global climate change and economic hard times, they run for all of us.
Proposition M’s defeat would force Metro to make deep cuts in service early next year. Trains and buses would run less frequently and serve fewer areas. Plans to expand MetroLink would be put on hold indefinitely.

A scaled-back system would mean less federal operating support. The inability to raise local matching funds would mean missed opportunities for capital subsidies. And given the very long planning and budgeting process that transportation systems require, we would be living with the consequences of those missed opportunities for years to come.

Metro faces a $45 million shortfall in its operating budget, and, yes, some of the problem is of its own making: poor planning on the Cross County MetroLink extension, flawed judgment and poor oversight of its failed lawsuit against the Cross County’s construction managers. Larry Salci, the agency’s former president, ran roughshod over a sleepy board of commissioners.

But most of the shortfall was beyond the agency’s control, a toxic combination of cutbacks in state, federal and county support and new accounting rules. Metro’s strong new management needs an alert, involved and astute board of commissioners and active support from the politicians on both sides of the river who appoint them.

Prop M would raise an estimated $80 million a year. Half would be used for ongoing operations, with the remainder banked for future MetroLink expansion. Approval in St. Louis County also would trigger a similar sales tax in the city that voters approved in 1997.

Too often public transit is misperceived as a social service for the poor; it is, in fact, a crucial tool for economic development. To change that skewed public perspective, the members of our region’s business and civic community need to realize that writing a check, while necessary, is not enough. This is a time for leadership, not merely lip service.

It began with a $1.2 trillion loss on Wall Street as stocks dropped 8 percent in a single day. It ended with Congress passing and President George W. Bush signing a $700 billion financial market rescue bill that hardly anyone understands.

In between, the stock market recovered most of its Monday loss, but the American economy slid further into recession. Two major U.S. banks fought over the remains of a third, the government reported that 159,000 Americans lost their jobs last month and the governor of California — which, if it were a country, would have the seventh-largest economy in the world — is shopping for a $7 billion loan. And all of this took place against the backdrop of a presidential election that is just a month away.

In a normal week, any one of these stories would have dominated the news. In the week just passed, they fell one after another, like cluster bombs in a shock-and-awe campaign. And there was no place to hide.

That didn’t stop 228 members of the House of Representatives from trying to find one. They voted “no” on the first iteration of the financial rescue plan negotiated by the Bush administration and congressional leaders. That sent the plan down to defeat on Monday, leading to a 778-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average and a further choking of the credit markets.

Cooler heads prevailed in the Senate. The upper chamber reconfigured the package to include a 10-year, $150 billion package of tax cuts and a temporary increase in federal bank deposit insurance limits. The good news: Middle-class taxpayers who could get clobbered by the alternative minimum tax got a renewed waiver. The bad news: Special interests (among them owners of auto race tracks, the rum industry, the woolen industry and — incredibly — the wooden-arrows-for-children industry) got tax breaks.

In the meantime, House members who voted “no” were hearing from businesses back home that they couldn’t get credit. They were learning that the $700 billion is largely an accounting figure, not an actual immediate cash payout. And they were realizing that the psychological effects of not passing the bill would create dire cash-flow problems for all businesses and individuals, whether on Wall Street, Main Street or Chouteau Avenue.

Three dozen House members changed their minds, and early Friday afternoon, by a 263-171 vote, the House concurred with the Senate bill — just in time for them to catch planes home to campaign.

And not a moment too soon. Fundamentally, the economy runs on credit, and credit runs on confidence. The credit crisis that started with subprime mortgage loans, and escalated with the Ponzi-like stacking of opaque financial derivatives atop those loans, had undermined that confidence.

Only Washington could restore it, and by playing politics with the rescue plan, Congress failed in its responsibilities. Americans deserved straight answers on complicated questions, not pandering.

Fortunately, grown-ups, including Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, stepped in. So did Republican candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona, although Mr. McCain’s bona fides as a born-again regulator remain highly suspect.

Both men now have an obligation to soothe the nation’s jangled nerves. Wall Street and Washington may be able to settle the fight between Wells Fargo Bank and Citigroup for control of Wachovia — something of major interest to the 4,800 employees at Wachovia’s St. Louis-based securities division. And the federal government will have to rescue — of all people — the one-time action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of cash-strapped California.

But the nation as a whole is looking to Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain for reassurance, not platitudes, sound bites or empty theatrical gestures. Back on that overworked synecdoche called Main Street, Americans want to know things are going to calm down, that the country will play fair with them, that their jobs and families will be safe, that the bailout won’t leave them holding the bag for fat cats.

The candidate who can assure them of that will win. And should.

“What adult acts like this?” asked Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group. “Senators are not spoiled children who can lash out on the playground . . . when they don’t get their way. U.S. attorneys are not toadies for their Senate sponsors, they are federal law enforcement officials.”

The story takes a look at the involvement of Sen. Kit Bond’s office in the 2006 ouster of U.S. Attorney Todd Graves in Kansas City. We refer to you to our editorial on the subject posted here and further down on this blog.

SEC. 503. EXEMPTION FROM EXCISE TAX FOR CERTAIN WOODEN ARROWS DESIGNED FOR USE BY CHILDREN.     (a) In General.–Paragraph (2) of section 4161(b) is amended by redesignating subparagraph (B) as subparagraph (C) and by inserting after subparagraph (A) the following new subparagraph:     “(B) EXEMPTION FOR CERTAIN WOODEN ARROW SHAFTS.–Subparagraph (A) shall not apply to any shaft consisting of all natural wood with no laminations or artificial means of enhancing the spine of such shaft (whether sold separately or incorporated as part of a finished or unfinished product) of a type used in the manufacture of any arrow which after its assembly–     “(i) measures \5/16\ of an inch or less in diameter, and     “(ii) is not suitable for use with a bow described in paragraph (1)(A).”

You, the American taxpayer, are probably saying “What’s up with that?” It seems that an Oregon firm that manufacturers toy bows and arrows for children was upset that its arrows were subject to the same 39-cent excise tax that applies to real hunting arrows. Since 1937, a portion of the money from the sale of firearms and bow-hunting equipment goes to a special federal wildlife restoration fund created by the Pittman-Robertson Act. The Oregon firm argued that it wasn’t fair that toy arrows are subject to the same tax as real hunting arrows.

So Sens. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, and Gordon Smith, a Republican, inserted Section 503 into the bailout act. It will cost the U.S. Treasury $2 million a year. It seems like an odd vehicle for a special tax break, but it does seem fair.

So even though the arrows will be cheaper, kids should still be careful. You could put an eye out.

Minister Xie Feng

Amid a grinding U.S. economic crisis, leaders from the Chinese Embassy and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came to town to tout local development opportunities derived from trade with China, which had 10.8 percent growth in gross domestic product last year.

Although Americans are punch drunk from a bevy of financial blows, the booming Chinese market offers new hope for domestic job creation, including here in the Midwest.

Minister Xie Feng, Deputy Chief of Mission for the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, and senior trade advisor Leslie M. Schweitzer of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce conveyed those rays of hope to a group of business leaders gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which already was humming with activity from the vice presidential debate.

Large St. Louis-area companies such as InBev/Anheuser-Busch and Peabody Energy Corp. already have established significant operations and presence in China. Area industries such as agriculture (especially soybeans) and biotech have increasing opportunity for growth.

But their message gets drowned out by deep economic problems and steadily worsening unemployment numbers in the United States. A gloomy mood overshadows the idea that there is room at the international trade table for local companies with special expertise, they said, not just products to be shipped.

Ms. Schweitzer cited a local architecture firm working to build the rapidly developing China and culinary expertise for new high-end restaurants. Intellectual capital and business smarts are needed in a country bursting with development. They are on a national tour of cities like St. Louis, which can leverage local business to expand their markets abroad and their own jobs domestically.

Rising unemployment nationally and locally creates hostility for foreign trade, which is blamed for sending jobs abroad and creating hardship for U.S. workers. The forces of economic globalization are indeed very painful here in the Midwest in some sectors, but they cannot be managed unilaterally by U.S. leadership.

While U.S. workers continue to struggle through a historic downturn, the message from the Chinese and U.S. government officials is that innovation and creativity can help to offset the out flow of jobs by creating new ones tied to international markets.

Daunted by the unfolding economic woes, people find it hard to embrace the long view. Reality needs to set in and they should recognize what globalization can mean in reverse. It’s painful and messy. Many lives are damaged by job dislocations and eliminations.

They had a poignant admonition: the shifting of workforce is beyond any one country’s control. Change will continue. And if the United States doesn’t seize the chance to expand in the developing parts of the world, other countries will fill the void and only exacerbate joblessness in the U.S. economy.

The bigger and more prominent the word in a candidate’s cloud, the more frequently that candidate used it in their remarks. Sen. Biden’s word cloud is above, and Gov. Palin’s is below.

On the other hand, Democrat Joe Biden did not stick his foot in his mouth. Republican Sarah Palin did not ramble into incoherence. In the last 150 years, the currency of expectations has been devalued, and the grand issues of state have been reduced to this: Don’t screw up.

By this mean standard, the debate at Washington University here was a success for both Ms. Palin, the neophyte governor of Alaska, and Mr. Biden, the veteran senior senator from Delaware. The fundamental job for vice presidential candidates in a debate is this: Don’t lose the election for their running mates.

At 9:30 last evening, both Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois may have breathed a sigh of relief. Mr. McCain’s may have been a tad louder.

Coming off a disastrous set of interviews with Katie Couric of CBS, Ms. Palin faced a bar of expectations set exceedingly low. She easily cleared it, aiming her folksy “Joe Sixpack,” “hockey mom,” “Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again” quips directly at the huge television audience.

She floated like a butterfly but did not sting like a bee, though she tried to every now and then. She also blatantly dodged questions from moderator Gwen Ifill and returned time and again to the talking points she has been repeating on the campaign trail for weeks. Ms. Ifill did not pursue her, nor did the format allow Mr. Biden to question her directly.
If this had been a boxing match, she might have earned points for style. But Mr. Biden easily deflected her best punches and counter-punched hard.

Her biggest mistake came an hour into the 90-minute debate when she suggested that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden should “stop the blame game” and look forward instead of backward.

Mr. Biden countered with a jab, “The past is prologue,” and then dropped a hard right hand, “How much is John McCain’s policy going to be different from George Bush’s? I haven’t heard anything yet.”

The second, but ultimately more important job for vice presidential candidates is to demonstrate that they’re capable of being president. After all, that’s the only reason we have a vice president.

In that, Mr. Biden clearly was superior. His grasp of issues came through even in a format that limited his usual loquacity to two-minute remarks. His understanding of nuances of diplomacy, the existential threat of nuclear proliferation and even the vagaries of Iranian governance was far more impressive than Ms. Palin’s rote dependence on her talking points.

On the economy, Ms. Palin may have tickled her supporters with her “gosh darn it” colloquialisms — “You go to a kids’ soccer game on Saturday and you betcha you’re going to hear some fear” — but Mr. Biden had his “Main Street” moment, too: “The people get it,” he said of the economy. “They know they’ve been getting the short end of the stick.”

If, as with doctors, the first rule for vice presidential candidates is “First, do no harm,” then the debate was a success for both sides. The Republican base will be thrilled with Ms. Palin’s performance, and the Democrats always knew what they were getting in Joe Biden.

But this election is narrowing to fewer and fewer states. Polls show that an increasing number of voters have made up their minds, which means the key audience for the debate was neither the crowd at Washington University’s field house nor the audience nationwide, but undecided voters in a handful of key states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and perhaps Missouri among them.

Ms. Palin’s performance may have been entertaining to them. Mr. Biden’s surely was reassuring. But in the next 32 days, the two men at the tops of the tickets will have to seal the deal.