The current Presidential campaign and the current worldwide financial crisis are unfolding in real time and in public, played out in video clips of campaign rallies and pronouncements by major players, such as the four candidates for national office, and by various officeholders, as well as by past office holders, such as secretaries of the treasury, whose statements are every much as downcast as are those of the standard stable of political and economic commentators. Not every meeting, such as those over the past weekend by the finance ministers of the G-8, are televised, but there are enough messengers running onto the stage with the news that everybody who is in attendance at the drama knows what is going on off stage.

Like all dramatists, history is more concerned with the impact of events than with showing the original causes of those events. In other words, we are always set in the midst of the action. The assassination of Caesar is more dramatic because of the conspiracies before hand and afterwards, and yet Shakespeare does not have to review the history of Rome to tell us how the Romans got to this point, only that Caesar had kingly ambitions and that friendship is a bond of considerable importance to Roman citizens. The rest, the heart of the drama, follows from the set up premises, and we see how it plays out. Similarly, we wince at Othello strangling his wife, wondering whether Othello can somehow summon the courage to take a more general view of his situation, because we already know the forces that have gone into his predicament: how much he loved her as well as the strength of his rage. In similar fashion, we know how we got into the present financial and political mess, or at least those who accept the common democratic vision that it was the financial mess was the result of deregulation and the political mess was the result of Bush, pure and simple, and we stand agape and watch as the economy unravels, not knowing how far it will go, and the machinery of politics rumbles on, perhaps providing the cavalry in the nick of time before we are turned into a nation that is the shadow of its former self.

There is another Shakespearean element to the current financial-political drama. Two plots are set one against the other to both complicate and illuminate one another. There is the economic drama which sets us to wonder and look for clues as to what is going on, the audience learning of new terms and problems as they become relevant, and not too much later, apparently, than the actors themselves, “the experts”, become familiar with a credit panic or a proposed purchase of bank stock that stops short of being a nationalization of the banks because what the government will purchase are non-voting shares in these financial entities, which is a far cry from what happened in Great Britain in the nineteen forties when industries were nationalized precisely so that the government could set policy for the important players in the national economy. There is also the political drama, much more fustian, where the audience searches for the way the leading characters define themselves, whether they show themselves up to the job by the kind of people they show themselves to be when they operate in the midst of a crisis, however small a role they have to play in managing the crisis as it presently is.

The relation of the two plots are as complex as one would find in Shakespeare: One drama is about who will inherit the other drama, determine who will be the players, come January, who will take over the roles now played by Paulson and Bush and Cox and so many others, we already knowing that Pelosi and Frank will retain their roles, though under changed circumstances. Will their roles be enhanced or diminished when there is a new President and a new Secretary of the Treasury? The dual dramas bifurcate our minds so that we dwell on the future as well as on the present and on a simultaneity that arises because everybody knows that what is being witnessed is an act in a drama that will continue past January when the weights of the roles will be rearranged in ways only known by the playwright who does not exist.

The political talk shows last Sunday were a particularly crucial moment in the drama. Both the players (the officeholders, both public and private) and the critics (the pundits) exhibited near panic. The head of trading for UBS said that if there was no plan put forward by the G-8 by late afternoon, when the Asian markets opened, on how to manage the crisis, then all hell would break lose. Then Larry Summers and James Baker, playing at chummy through the use of first names, agreed on much the same point, as if they were using their joint appearance on television as a platform from which to project influence based on their past power. Paul Krugman, as an influential columnist, was on the roundtable panel of This Week and so was in a position to answer George Will, the house intellectual, and say that the economic crisis was real, and that we did indeed have to quickly endorse the British plan to buy up bank stocks and so abandon Paulson’s original plan to buy up the securities that were based on toxic mortgages. Krugman was still a few hours removed from being raise to a Nobel Laureate, and so we do not know what will be made of him from now on at the talk shows he frequents.

Well, the plan was agreed to by the Europeans, just as Krugman and the others had suggested must happen, and that was followed a day later by the United States endorsing much the same kind of plan, but that was enough for the stock market to rebound, something it had not done on previous promises that something would be done in a few days. So, for a moment, the downward spiral was halted, or as the new argot is apt to say, the stock market, at least for a moment, found a bottom. And yet on Wednesday the stock market dropped precipitously again. This time, the explanation offered was that the thought of the impending recession had settled in, and that was what the market had moved on to consider, rather than any longer focusing on the immediate financial crisis. As usual, everybody treats the stock market as if it is an actor with a will and interests of its own, and so something—someone—who can be coaxed into doing something, as if it were a recalcitrant child, or reminded to take some responsibility for its actions, when the market is in fact, the intersection of a number of events not easily set into a pattern, and so the resultant rather than the originator of actions. Shakespeare would make much of treating an inchoate set of forces as if they were inspirited now by one demon, now by another, sort of like Anthony in Anthony and Cleopatra.

The discussion of Tuesday and Wednesday, so far as the market was concerned, was about the fairness of the plan, which suggests that people presumed it would work. The British had insisted that the heads of the banks that were being rescued step down as they had shown themselves to be failures at managing a vital institution of society. They deserved no reward for their malfeasance. Only pundits demand the same thing of American bankers and heads of American investment houses because that would reek of socialism, though there is no reason not to wring concessions from Wall Street in exchange for having come through with the recapitalization of the financial industry. You can strike a mighty good deal when the people across the table have no option but to accept your deal.

Meanwhile, the political plot proceeded apace, though about other, purely political matters, in that both Obama and McCain supported both the original Paulson plan and the subsequent modification of it that made it consistent with the European plan. Indeed, those Congresspeople who refused to knuckle under, who showed some nerve, in refusing to vote for the original Paulson plan, despite the outrage against them as serving the narrow self interest of their constituents rather than the national interest, are the ones who should be regarded as the heroes of the crisis. It was they who got the plan amended so as to include the option of Paulson buying bank stock, which turned out to be the authority he really needed. (I note that I was willing to back the original legislation, not that I was subject to constituent pressure, but because it did seem to me a public duty, when having the courage of my doubts would have been the better decision.)

The frame for the political debate was set by what had gone on during some town hall sessions McCain had staged. The networks and the talk programs carried a clip of an elderly woman telling McCain that she did not trust Obama because he was…he was…he was an Arab. (Commentators have wondered whether she was using a euphemism for his being black, while I think she just was so frazzled by actually talking to McCain that she came up with the first epithet that had been associated with Obama that came to mind.) McCain gently took the microphone back from her and said that Obama was not an Arab, but rather a family man with whom McCain had deep disagreements about principle (though I am at a lose to know what those disagreements are, given that they both now support government involvement in the most hallowed halls of free enterprise, and that both want more troops in Afghanistan, and they both regard the Iraq War as coming to a close, Obama the more anxious of the two to get a peace or at least a theatre of operations dividend.)

Though McCain campaign people said that they can’t be held responsible for everyone who shows up at their rallies, the truth is that this moment captured the spirit of what the McCain campaign had become. The moment will go down as the film clip that summarizes the entire 2008 campaign, just as the chants in the streets of Chicago, only one of many famous clips, was the one that summed up the 1968 campaign and Al Gore’s sigh and the sight of those recounting the ballots looking at some hanging chads were the best summaries of the 2000 campaign. McCain seemed a bit stunned. Yes, he had been playing around with inflammatory language, and yet he was upset that some of it actually took hold, the art of politics being to formulate a rhetoric, a set of phrases, that allows people to feel self-righteous without taking it all to seriously, just the way Yankee and Red Sox fans allow themselves to be contemptuous of one another while still remembering it is just a game, politics also a game, at least in a democracy, where the opposing sides hurl bric a brac at one another and then make up on or soon after Election Day. Isn’t that what Al Gore did in 2000? What McCain hadn’t realized was that he had unleashed more than he meant to by allowing Palin to say that Obama “palled” around with terrorists. If that was the case, then why had McCain shaken hands with this Manchurian Candidate at the debates? McCain has been playing the rhetorical game too fine, so publicly aware has he been that there are dirty and distorting tactics used in campaigns, whatever are the fine motives for using them. McCain had decided to play to his base to get the nomination and then go to his base to enliven his campaign once it became clear that he couldn’t get the vice presidential candidate he wanted, and so he is left only with his base, ashes in the mouth of the one time maverick who had in 2000 made a legitimate, though superficial, appeal for bipartisanship. McCain is something of a tragic figure in that the campaign has besmirched his oh so honorable reputation,  but perhaps I only say that because the polls show him so far behind that he is to be already relegated to the ranks of those who ran for President.

Rhetoric tells us the underlying structure and what the true roles of the participants are in this fast paced and incident filled drama that was still unfolding through the third debate that was held on Wednesday, and which, I find it sad to say, is going to be over in a few weeks and then the victor will have to get to the difficult policy and bureaucracy driven world of administering the nation rather than the rhetorical and personality driven world of campaigning. Look at an example of how McCain phrases a point more successfully than did Palin who went beyond the pale in describing Obama as beyond the pale. McCain said on Tuesday, so as to distance himself from Bush, though much too late to make much of a difference, that we “can’t spend the next four years as we have spent the last eight: waiting for our luck to change”. Yes, this is a criticism of Bush that points to his passivity and fecklessness. But it is clever in not chastising him directly in that it is the mouthing of a fresh phrase that refers, usually, to what can be considered either a minor or major moral flaw that is so general that we have been warned against it since we were young. (My mother gave me the opposite advice. Wait for your card to come. But that applied only to gin rummy, and I knew it.) The phrase recasts the question of McCain’s ties to Bush by invoking a new way of seeing Bush’s shortcomings without spelling out what those shortcomings had been. Everybody gets the message without anyone having to take offense. That, as I say, is the talk of a baseball manager or some other executive explaining why the team is not living up to expectations.

The most important of the rhetorical devices in use, the one that neatly brings together the clashing themes of economy and politics, is that both parties use the word “taxpayer” to describe the stakes ordinary people have in the outcome of the financial crisis. The taxpayers have their money at stake; they are the ones who now pay for the junkets AIG higher ups continued to take even after the Federal Government had pumped money into that entity. Taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill if it turns out that the toxic mortgages or the stocks bought in the banks do not pay off. It is all about risk and investment, the government simply the holder of the investments made by taxpayers into the Treasury, convinced as they are that the money is likely not well spent because government, after all, is the entity doing the spending. And now that that public owns part of AIG, AIG should be subject to the same short leash put on government officials when they travel. No one on the public payroll is to be trusted.

And yet, “taxpayer” is a poor description of the kind of engagement and social investment people make in their government. The term only covers the amounts people contribute to the treasury, which is unequal, and does not include all those people who do not pay taxes. There is something grander than being a taxpayer. It is being a citizen, a role held equally by every one of them, in that every citizen has the same rights, even if it is far more difficult for a poor man to defend those rights than it is for a rich man to do so. The United States is an organization of citizens, not of taxpayers, which means that people who pay very little in also have the right to vote and have their interests represented by the government. Using the term “taxpayer” makes government, by definition, a selfish and begrudging entity, while speaking of the citizenry is to invoke the possibility of the commonality of everyone in spite of their economic and other differences.

Citizenship is not a virtue or a role that has played much of a part in the rhetoric of this campaign, but there are reasons to think that the concept is behind the emotions that have been evoked by incidents such as the one earlier mentioned that took place at a McCain rally. The reason people are appalled by it is that it shows people being selfish and narrow-sighted when they cast their ballot, which is a citizenship function rather than the function of a person who is a mere stockholder in the United States regarded as a corporation. We want of citizens that they do attend to the national interest, that they rise above their parochial selves, however much we know that their self interest and their personal identifications and antipathies play a large part in their vote. Couldn’t this woman, for once, go beyond her prejudices because the majestic event of casting a vote for President required it? The news pundits did not put it that way, though they well might have, and so reawakened a sense of the word “citizen”. We want of politics that it be a noble thing, even if Wall Street, by definition, never can be, because it is dedicated pure and simple to the ideal of making money.

The pundits set up Wednesday night’s debate as the climactic moment of the election campaign. The New York Daily News front page said “Showdown” over a cartoon of McCain as a frontier gunslinger. The question at issue was whether there was anything that McCain could do at this late date to rescue his campaign. What that boiled down to was whether he would attack Obama broadside by evoking William Ayers, the Sixties terrorist, or even bring up the shade of Jeremiah Wright, however much that might play into the racist sentiments of some of his followers, and even though it might inspire some nut case to violence, a possibility that has been given gingerly but significant notice on both cable and network television. Most commentators hoped McCain would do the decent thing and place citizenship above passion, and so save some of his reputation, do the Al Gore thing and accept his defeat, which is what I thought was happening when he chastised the lady in the arena, however much since then he has been threatening to let it all hang out. We would see if he has the courage of forbearance, a kind of courage far more complex than the courage he demonstrated years ago in Hanoi. It would be a nice bookend to his career, finish out his drama really well, Sarah Palin to fade back into the Alaskan snows now that her services are no longer needed and she has been found out to be so narrow gauged that all she can do is rant in a pretty manner. Joe McCarthy was not very pretty. There is, after all, the next play, the drama of recovery, the Obama Deal following upon the Square Deal and the New Deal and the Fair Deal and the War on Poverty, the role of the Clintons in American history dampened precisely because they never did make a Big Deal of their programs, preferring to triangulate. We all would see, and at the same time, how these questions were answered by events taking place in prime time.

The debate, as it actually happened, devoted only one of its nine minute segments to Ayers, who everybody now knows was a Sixties Weatherman and who now has achieved an additional globule of celebrity that will surely get him in the annals of presidential politics. The question about him was asked by the moderator, not originally raised by either of the candidates, and the television viewers, their opinions indicated by focus groups and hand held meters, were sick of the whole controversy and wanted more on the economy, though it was wise for both candidates not to go too deeply into how they would handle the current financial crisis in that they do not have responsibility to deal with it and cannot say what will be its state when one of them assumes office. So citizenship was more important in the minds of the candidate and the public than the role of the public as taxpayers.

The distinction between the two terms did come up, was addressed, though again with only the word “taxpayer” being evoked, in the closing remarks by the two candidates. Citizenship, in the current argot, means putting country first. McCain did appeal to the stewardship of the public’s tax dollars as one of the functions of government, but he also mentioned two other functions, national security and the wellbeing of the population, in an ascending order of importance, and so made the case for the citizen over the taxpayer. Obama spoke of an investment that had to be made in the American people as a way to describe his point that money will have to be spent to get us out of the current mess and to rebuild the economy. “Investment” is an economic term and is a way of avoiding the term “spending” with its associated meaning of “wasteful spending”. Yet, in the context, it refers to a financial act to shore up the nation as a whole, and so has the association of being the action of a government out to intervene for the good of society, and so is a way of speaking of citizenship without that word, turning the opposite image to the contrary purpose. That rhetorical device is certainly allowed by the gods of rhetoric and was certainly understood that way by the people who watched. This debate, therefore, was an exercise in the invocation of citizenship without the use of that word, and the electorate felt comforted by that, which makes more and more certain that Obama, having placed himself on that side of the ledger, has the election locked up, which is what the pundits keep saying even though we are still three weeks out. Keep your fingers crossed.