House Minority leader John Boehner (speaking) and other House GOP leaders said Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "partisan" speech spurred defeat of the bailout bill. (Photo: Susan Walsh / AP)
 

Well, no sooner had I written a piece assuming that Hank Paulson’s Package would become law, then the U.S. House of Representatives voted “no” in a spectacular rejection of the wishes of Wall Street, the Washington establishment and the president of the United States. It was a demonstration of democracy at its finest—or worst—depending on your point of view.

Ain’t democracy grand? Infuriating, yes. Unpredictable, yes. And grand. All the Washington powers that be and all the New York money men simply could not convince the House of Representatives—"the People’s House”—to swallow the Paulson Plan.

What happened? Here are a few of the forces at work:

Ben Heineman, Jr., is the kind of superbly credentialed, deeply experienced and level headed Washington lawyer we used to call a wise man-and used to call on to solve our national crises.

In spite of that, I laughed him off last summer when, at the Aspen Institute, he made what, at the time, seemed an off-the-wall, not to say naïve, suggestion: that senators Barack Obama and John McCain immediately start planning and announcing to the world the starting lineup of their possible administrations. They should then set them to work, he said, as a British-style shadow cabinet.

I replied that that would be politically risky, not to mention presumptuous.

But now I see why a wise man is a wise man: Ben was right; boy, was he right.

We are in unprecedented times, scary economic waters in which we cannot afford a moment of rudderless drift. Otherwise, as George W. Bush memorably said, “this sucker is going down.”

Soon enough, the hand on the tiller is going to be Hank Paulson’s. Once the federal bailout of the credit market is passed by Congress and signed into law (both are quite likely to happen), the treasury secretary will, in effect, become the interim president.