There was some real fear in the room, and it had nothing to do with the Democratic Party.

I heard it when I talked to Sen. Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota. He is a low-key sort, reared in the soft-spoken ways of the Northern Plains, trained in the bleak science of accounting at Stanford University. Fiscal matters are his forte, though he never seems to get too worked up about them. His idea of high drama in the Senate is an easel with a really great bar chart.

So I was taken aback the other night by how vehement and shaken Conrad seemed (I've known him for 20 years; I can detect such things).

As chairman of the Budget Committee (and ranking member on Finance as well), Conrad is plugged into the socket of the credit crisis. When I saw him he'd just been briefed—and shocked—by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

The two men had told him that, if the government had not taken over AIG Insurance, the entire economy of the United States, and much of the rest of the world, could have fallen into deep panic. Like an aggressive tumor, AIG's unsustainable insurance guarantees were spread like poisonous filigree not just in hedge funds, brokerage houses and banks, but also on the books of blue-chip corporations atop the Fortune 500. "Some very big names were in danger," he said.

"They had to do what they did," Conrad explained to me. "No choice." And as we have since learned, the takeover of AIG was not enough to calm the markets. Indeed, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.

Where the Democrats blameless?

Of course they weren't. Even Democrats in the room admitted it.

The bipartisan consensus was that the festival of dangerous greed began in the Clinton 90s. Democrats, abandoning their union and working-class skepticism of the markets, threw in with a new crowd of pro-business, pro-deregulation donors. Also, they countenanced an anything-goes mentality at what became the party's favorite new social-uplift tools, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two behemoths papered the planet with cheap (and, as we now see, shaky) home mortgages, with the whole process run (and protected) by a get-rich-quick cadre of political hacks.

But the consensus in the room also was that the sordid history didn't contain enough anti-Democratic ammunition to do McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that much good.

In politics as in baseball, fans—voters—focus on what happens in the ninth inning, not the first. The Democrats whiffed on the credit crisis in the early years, but now they aren't at bat. It was President George W. Bush who nominated Paulson and Bernanke. If they strike out, it's the GOP that will lose the game.

Or so Obama has calculated, as he coolly waits for the next big wave.

© 2008