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.

Okay, it’s quiz time!  Which was the bigger political train wreck today?

1. The stock market losing nearly 700 points because of no financial bailout?
2. John McCain taking credit for the bailout coalition right before it fell apart?
3. Jill Long Thompson’s campaign talking about the Governor’s travel using incomplete records and an incomplete statute on the day stocks fell nearly 700 points because there was no bailout?
4. All of the above.

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.

Okay, let’s all be honest, no one is crazy about writing a check for $700 billion to bailout a bunch of people who made bad decisions.  

However, the problem is what would happen if we did nothing.  As much as I would love to see a lot of people get their up-comings, someone has to be the grown-up here.

Think of it as a parent whose kid gets arrested.   You can leave him their indefinitely or you can let him sit for a while.  My father did the latter and somehow it worked.

I don’t think it’s the best deal in the world and I don’t think it’s the worse deal.  It could use some improvements definitely.

But as much as it costs to do something, it would have been a lot worse and cost a lot more to do absolutely nothing.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to go run up a bunch of bills so I can qualify for my government bailout.