Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing
this fringe, then the president and his party will have
to confront their real problem: their identification
with the titans who greased the skids for the economic
meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the
country has not. If there's one general lesson to be
gleaned from Christie's victory over Jon Corzine in New
Jersey, it's surely that in today's zeitgeist it's less
of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat
cat, even in a blue state.

Americans don't hate rich people, but they do despise
those who behave as if the rules don't apply to them.
"Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third
Term" was the cover line on New York magazine in
October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his
air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street
C.E.O.'s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the
rest of us with the bill.

The Obama administration does not seem to understand
that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It
has pushed aside the entreaties of many -- including
Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House's own
Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- to break up
too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by
the government's bailouts, low-interest loans and
guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire
system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard
the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on "Meet the
Press" dodging questions about the banks in general and
Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides.
"We're not going to let the system go back to the way
it was," he said.

Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy
Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington,
publicly questioned Geithner's fitness for his job,
given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations
of the derivatives that enabled last year's collapse.
On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White
House's consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent
corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt,
the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman,
told me on Friday it was "surreal" that Democrats were
now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing
"the golden chalice" of reform. If investors cannot
have transparency, Levitt said, "the whole system is
worthless."

The system is going back to the way it was with a
vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the
unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at
week's end, we learned that bankers were helping
themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the
bubble's peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine.
No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates
in late September felt that "large banks" had been
helped "a lot" or "a fair amount" by "government
economic policies," but only 13 percent felt the
"average working person" had been. Unemployment ranked
ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1
pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying
the Obama administration must take more action.