The post title is the title of a piece by Godfrey Hodgson at OpenDemocracy. His argument is that, in the rejection of the bailout bill,

Wall Street met democracy - and blinked first. The people have forced their politicians to bend the knee.

Well, perhaps. An alternative reading is that a necessary but badly-sold Bill raised populist ire from both a right-wing free-markets-or-death direction and a left-wing screw-the-banks direction, ending up in the unloved centre ground. Opinion polls showed that the bailout was unpopular (though doing nothing was even less popular) - but that’s not the same as democracy.

This is a tricky issue for politicians, because they are giving money to bankers, whose public image is reckless gamblers driven wild with excess, and the linkage into real people’s lives and jobs is complicated and partly speculative.

Really - though politicians six weeks before an election will be unwilling to say this - all Americans with houses or with cheap credit have benefited from the boom, and although bankers may have benefited more than others, they are not the only ones with cash-stains on their hands.

What would happen if voters could repeal income tax laws by referendum? In Massachusetts, they can. And they might just be about to.

A vote held in 2002 split 45/55 against the repeal of the tax, which provides nearly half the state’s tax income. Now, with the economy turning down, and the prospect of saving over $3,500 a year on average, how many voters are going to think about the consequences in terms of funding cuts?

The leader of the repeal movement is quoted in the Times article linked above, saying that no services would be cut, and that “All we have to do is cut government waste”.

Meanwhile, a Republican legislator says “If we lose $12.5 billion, can I build a responsible budget with that loss in revenue? No, I can’t.” More realistically, a vox pop in the article wonders how high the property tax would have to go to make up the difference.

Fireworks night in Boston could be November 6th.

The Society has put in a bid for the Building Democracy Innovation Fund, which I mentioned back on the blog a month or two ago.

Writing the bid is the reason that I’ve been a bit quiet the last couple of days - or rather writing the bid and watching the slow crashing of the US economy. A particularly useful reference on the latter, both for its content and for occasional reminders that this is all far too complicated for us normals to understand, is the FT Alphaville blog.

Two quick democratic points to head into the weekend with. First, on the bailout, I thought it was interesting that John McCain saw political advantage in stopping campaigning to go back to Washington and ‘help’. Some have alleged it was a stunt, but even if it was a stunt, it’s interesting to see the message it was meant to send out: campaigning is politics, but fixing the economy is statesmanship, and the second comes before the first. Personally, I would have thought most voters were far more interested in finding out the character of a potential future president by seeing him campaign rather than by seeing him bury himself in a committee room. The evidence from the polls is that most voters do indeed see it that way.

Second, a good article from Fistful of Euros about a telecoms package passing in the European Parliament. Worth a read - honest.

Guido Fawkes, probably one of the better known political bloggers in the UK, has produced a list showing the places from which most of his visitors come. The top five (all those with more than 10,000 visits) were:

1. Houses of Parliament - 88628

2. British Broadcasting Corporation - 21471

3. Conservative Central Office - 18631

4. Oxford University - 18419

5. University of Cambridge - 12788

Charlie Beckett’s take on this is that the list “is a quality advertiser’s dream of a pool of influential people interested in current affairs.”

My own view is that it shows how internal political gossip and wrangling around personalities (Guido’s stock-in-trade) are of very little interest to people not already well within the political loop. That’s not to say that policy and philosophy are of more interest, but at least it’s possible to make them relevant to people’s everyday lives.

The comments sections on political sites, including both of ours [Wonkette and Politico] and this one [New York magazine], are a really depressing thing to me. When I covered New York politics, they were often abusive, but at least vaguely reality-based.

Ben Smith from the Politico in a discussion at New York Magazine.

• What happens if the Presidential election is a tie? - BBC
• New web section on WashingtonPost.com will link to top politics articles around the web - Editor and Publisher
• And here it is - Washington Post Political Browser

The last few months have seen a riot of speculation in the press about the future of Gordon Brown’s premiership. This is obviously an important issue, but the treatment of it parallels the treatment of the US Presidential election by the mainstream US media: it’s not about the policies, it’s about the horse race.

There are obvious benefits for the media in presenting politics in this light. It makes it more interesting, for a start - who needs to bone up on all those tedious facts when you have a stream of gossip and speculation from inside Westminster to keep the front page ticking over?

The public-as-media-consumers might like this kind of personalised approach, though there isn’t much evidence that they do. Whether they do or not, personality coverage does the public-as-citizens a disservice. This is not because it downplays the importance of philosophical or economic debates - these are only ever going to be a minority interest - but because it creates an artificial sense of distance between politicians and the policies they implement. Who is Gordon Brown? He’s the Prime Minister, he’s gloomy on the telly, he has a couple of young kids, he is Scottish, he is a bit dour and … you probably have to go a long way with most people before you get to anything like a policy. So politicians become celebrities and their policies become detached from them - just another thing that the amorphous ‘they’ are doing to the country.

Take, for instance, a piece on this afternoon’s World At One, reporting from an RSA fringe event at the Labour Party conference, where David Miliband responded to statistics on political disengagement provided by Ben Page of Ipsos Mori.

Martha Kearney was the interviewer, and it was interesting to note that she introduced the report with the following words:

“The room was packed to hear David Miliband, who was - as you will hear - rather reluctant to answer my questions on leadership.”

That makes it sound like plucky Martha pushed weaselly David hard on the big issue, and got only waffle in return. In fact, if you listen to the piece (Martha and David starts at about 24 minutes) you will see that Ms Kearney asked over and over again about leadership elections, while David Miliband tried in vain to drag the discussion back to the topic of the debate: political disengagement.

The key quote (from David Miliband): “If we get to a stage where leading members of the Cabinet cannot say ‘let’s defend our record, let’s set out a vision’ [without sparking speculation about leadership bids] then we really are going to be in a world where the media are dictating the ability of politics to set an agenda for the country.”

Ms Kearney is barracked by the audience when she asks about the leadership election again, but insists that the Foreign Secretary repeat a form of words she has devised to determine his loyalty.

For all it was fun at that time, the famous Paxman/Howard interview set a bad precedent: now you can’t get the interviewers to shut up.

Happy New Year! Year 217 starts today, the 1 Vendémiaire. Meanwhile:

• A review of the election game Political Machine 2008 - Wired

• Political/serious magazines are becoming more popular, even as the mass market declines - Guardian
• Dave Briggs has updated his list of public sector bloggers - DavePress

OK. Enough about the US elections, let’s take a look at Russia. It turns out that the war in Georgia, and the associated worries about its political system, have caused serious market problems: indeed, both Russian stockmarkets are currently closed due to collapsing share prices. Report at FT.com.

Interesting poll in America, here at the Rasumussen website. In a hypotheical presidential race, Sarah Palin beats the much more experienced Joe Biden. Now, polls are polls and this isn’t even polling on a realistic question, but it is a straw in the wind (again) on how toxic it is to be the political insider - even if that means you know what’s going on.