The Stock Market Crash of 1929 was the triggering event for the Great Depression, but today we tend to forget that it didn’t all happen at once. Catastrophic bank failures, widespread panic, and the dispossession of millions of Americans happened in a series of waves that occurred through most of the 1930s. The inaction of the Hoover administration swept the Republicans out of office in 1932 and ushered in a dozen years’ duration of the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. FDR spent his entire first term dealing with the aftershocks, only to scarcely have time to move the nation forward before the Second World War would engulf us and become the engine of the national economy for the rest of his time in office.

Given the behavior of John McCain this week, all I can say is imagine if Roosevelt had decided to call “time out” to stage some pointless photo opportunities and make some political hay over the survival of this country. Even as the corporate leaders of the day attempted to organize a coup to steal the government away from President Roosevelt and replace it with a fascist military dictatorship during some of the bleakest times of the Depression, Roosevelt was not deterred. Critics of FDR make many good points about his pushing the envelope on Constitutional issues (though with the exception of the “court packing” scheme, what Roosevelt did isn’t even in the same ballpark with what Bush and Cheney have done), and the Supreme Court did eventually push much of the New Deal back in the closet (though not until the worst was over). The argument that extraordinary times may require extraordinary means is worth considering and even acceding to, as long as the people who take on those extraordinary measures do so with some degree of transparency and an absolute committment to the resolution of the crisis — NOT the indefinite extension of the crisis to extend that power, NOR for the political benefit of one party.

In 1933, the country was gripped by bank failures and panic runs that became so widespread and severe that the President declared a “bank holiday”, which temporarily closed the banks and gave the government time to review the status of all the banks in the country. The “holiday” lasted one week, and then banks were re-opened in a staggered mechanism depending on their relative security. It was an unprecedented move in American history and remains so even now. Roosevelt decided to address the nation via radio, thus inaugurating his famous “Fireside Chats” that would be his most direct communication with the public for his entire time in office.

Here is a recording of the first address, which explained the situation and the plan for the return to operation of the nation’s banking system. Compare Roosevelt’s remarks to Bush’s speech on Wednesday night, which tried to deflect any focus of criticism on the greed of the investment banks or the quarter-century of deregulation that undid the system of protections that Roosevelt’s administration enacted to prevent another meltdown like 1929 from happening. As Jon Stewart so astutely observed, Bush is reading from the same script that he used in 2003 to scare people into going along with his plan for the Iraq War. If Roosevelt’s address is a bit condescending (and it is), that stems in part from the greater psychological distance between average Americans and their government in those pre-media-saturation years, but in the fina analysis he makes a cogent explanation of the situation and the plan and offers an optimistic branch for people to grasp onto in the middle of what was a very frightening time. Bush, on the other hand, tells us that we’re all going to lose our homes and our jobs if we don’t do what he says and right now, not unlike the way he told us Saddam Hussein was going to kill us all with his weapons of mass destruction.

The two candidates for President have given us some significant insights into how we might expect them to respond to this crisis, which will surely outlast Bush and might even outlast them. Barack Obama has comported himself better than McCain, but has failed to demonstrate any initiative or real leadership, letting events simply go along as they will, controlled by the actions of others in Congress and Treasury Secretary Paulson. McCain, on the other hand, once again demonstrates his unsuitability to lead this country in a time of crisis; his flip-flopping on the very issue itself is disgraceful and blatantly cynical and his grandstanding demonstrates a complete lack of insight into the severity of the hardship that will befall the majority of Americans.

We are being failed by our political leadership at every level and on both sides of the political divide. Seventy-five years ago we were lucky enough to have as a national leader a man who understood the need to use political power for the greater good rather than personal gain or for the advantage of his supporters. Now we are saddled with a lame-duck president trying one last time to wrest power from government and hand it to a few powerful unaccountable figures and with two men, one of whom will definitely BE president in less than six weeks, but neither of whom has demonstrated where their leadership might take us.