Here’s an interesting question in the wake the financial bailout/rescue plan.  When you send someone to public office, are you asking them to represent you or use their best judgment?  Remember a pure democracy is four wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch?  In a republic, the lamb has a shotgun.

Could someone please let the pols and talking heads on Capitol Hill know that we here on Main Street are sick and tired of the Main Street/Wall Street comparison?

It was cute the first 3,276 times.

Leave it to Washington to take clever and beat it into rhetorical submission.

Stop. Please.

In a close vote on Capitol Hill, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected President George W. Bush’s bailout plan for the financial industry this afternoon.

This completely and totally sucks because it sent the markets into even more of a tailspin, and no one is sure what we’re going to do now.

But I’m not here to talk economics. I’m here to talk politics.

Politically, this was pretty predictable. We’re almost within a month of the November election, and this plan was woefully unpopular with real folks, who aren’t real keen on the idea that their tax dollars would go to bail out huge, irresponsible, greedy institutions.

And in truth, the final version of the plan did little for homeowners who face foreclosure or who’ve already lost their homes. In my mind, they’re the people who need the most help, not the CEO who’s going to have to turn in the keys to the third corporate jet or take a salary cut from $100 million to $99 million per year.

I also fault the President, who originally thought it would be good enough to pull an all-nighter, turn in some piece of crap proposal and get a passing grade. Only after a week went by did he realize he needed to put some oomph behind his desires, so he went on national television and delivered a quarter-hour of platitudes.

Behind the scenes, I have no idea what he’s been doing. In fairness to him as one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history, there might not be much he can do to twist the arms of his fellow Republicans, but it doesn’t seem like he’s tried very hard.

Then again, he kinda got us into this mess in the first place.

At the end of the day, I believe we need to do something. Letting this whole mess blow up and melt down isn’t an option. But we didn’t happen into this disaster overnight, and it seems to me there’s a very false sense of immediacy that’s been attached to the situation. (I’m not, for the record, saying we can wait months to solve the problem, but we might want to put a little more thought into it, what with it being one of the biggest financial decisions I’ll ever see in my lifetime.)

Anyway, the political bottom line is this: You can’t ask a bunch of people who are on the ballot in a few weeks to take a sudden plunge like committing $700 billion of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street without expecting a bit of negative fallout.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

In case you were wondering what you could do with the $700 Billion that’s going to bailout the nation’s financial industry, here are a few thoughts courtesy of Time magazine.

• You could give every poerson in the United States $2,300 or give every household $6,300.
• You could buy gas for every car in the United States for the next 16 months.
• You could pay the income taxes for every American who makes $500,000 or less.
• You could fully fund the departments of Defense, Treasury, Education, State, Veterans Affairs, Interior Department and NASA.
• You could buy every NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball team, build each one a new stadium and pay every player $191 million each for a year.
• You could pay off 7% of the nation’s $9.8 trillion debt.

According to Matt Tully’s column in the Indianapolis Star this morning, Mayor Greg Ballard is totally done talking off the cuff because the mean ol’ media keeps printing the dumb things he says.

Mayor Greg Ballard is tired of putting his foot in his mouth — and, he insists, he’s not going to do it anymore.

“Every time I do that, it comes back to bite me,” he said, referring to casual conversations with the media. From now on, he said, he’ll be much less inclined to stray from the talking points his staff pummels into his head.

That seems like a huge mistake, because the main political advantage Ballard has is his average-guy persona. Why would he want to turn himself into another slick politician — a role he doesn’t play very well?

Not to mention, Ballard’s administration has not been the most communicative in history. I’m still waiting for one substantial policy speech or one detailed explanation of his vision for the city. If anything, this guy should be talking more, not less.

Ouch.

But Tully’s right: It’s been nine months, and we’ve still seen nothing even remotely resembling vision from the 25th floor of the City-County Building.

What we have seen is a guy who can’t talk coherently on any subject and who throws things out on the table without thinking them through.

That, not his inability to string words into good quotes, is Hizzoner’s central problem. Lots of people can’t talk pretty.

Ballard is surrounded by two groups of people: powerful lawyers and lobbyists who want contracts from his administration and staffers who are either too inexperienced or incompetent to guide him in the right direction. He has no one by his side who’s looking out for his interests and who isn’t afraid to tell him when he’s about to screw up.

I’ve argued before that every elected official needs that person in his or her administration. Ballard, to make up for his complete lack of political comprehension, needs three of them.

Instead, he’s just going to stop talking altogether, which will give the other side (that’s me!) the chance to keep defining him as a bumbling newbie who hasn’t followed through on his campaign promises and has no vision for our great city.