Earlier anxieties about banks and bankers going unpunished had been responded to – quite vigorously from the squeaks coming out of the financial district. The argument had been cogent enough.

"We are undertaking this rescue not because we love the men in silk suits chopping up mortgage deals on terms assuring default, before mixing them with sound debt to make a dodgy hamburger.

"We are doing it because investment banks deal in the money without which mills do not roll, offices open, buses run, farms turn out meat and grain. If those banks, in the name of justice or revenge, are also chopped up and distributed to the crows then theoretically nothing happens until we get barter going on a steady base."

It was clear and true enough, and Congress should have voted for it. Instead, after a number of silly speeches, Congress voted it down and now the leadership, Bush, Obama and McCain, thrown together into the consensus of catastrophe, has had to try to put it together again, take Congress back up to the ledge and stop it from jumping again, a condition of absurdity. The Senate was due to vote on a new version of the bailout package last night and the House of Representatives returns to work today

So how did this happen? Largely it happened through populism. American politicians, however smart the restaurant where they dine, however sophisticated their educated judgment, must ever and again present themselves as guardians and friends of the "Little Guy". The main problem of Barack Obama is that he is reckoned not to be a regular guy – too educated, too smart, too complicated. Race, though a factor, counts less than the distancing of too obvious a superior education. "It's not that he's too black," the argument goes, "he's too Harvard."

Listen to Congressman Ted Poe on Monday night. He invoked imagery of "Mom and Pop grocery stores" and "Joe Six Pack" to criticise the Bill.

There is another factor – prideless flattery of the home base. We owe the word "Bunk" for perfect nonsense to a 19th Century North Carolina Congressman whose raptures about his district amused even other congressmen. His district was Buncombe County.

The relation of Congressmen – members of the House of Representatives – to their electoral districts is particularly deferential, not to say abject – and for good reason. While Senators are re-elected every six years, the Congressman must come scurrying back after two.

Senators represent US States, most of which are big places with big populations and counter-posed interests. The Congressional district, big enough by our standards, is yet narrow and beset with specifics – potatoes in Idaho, aviation interests in Washington State.

As to aviation, Henry "Scoop" Jackson of the latter state, was known as "The Senator from Boeing" and tending the jobs, profits and disputed deals of that corporation, he achieved perpetual re-election.

The local quality of resentment and anxiety is, though, different from corporation requirements. It is surprising that nobody during the present crisis rooted in the debauching of home loans has quoted that most American of films It's a Wonderful Life. Remember James Stewart as the near-crucified head of a little local mutual or savings and loan bank coveted by the glintingly evil Mr Potter who wants to make every kind of equally evil money.?

The loss of some documentation starts a run on the house. Jimmy contemplates suicide, but on the bridge he is going to jump from, he encounters an angel who shows him a vision of his small town flashing with neon, a mini – Las Vegas and renamed Pottersfield, an allusion which Bible-reading Americans would recognise as Judas Iscariot's investment of his 30 pieces of silver. The feeling is strong especially, in provincial America, that home is best, small town home is better, that the big city is evil. Five weeks from an election with a third of Senate seats and every House district being contested, Congressmen, however metropolitan, feel a terrible need to proclaim the Mom and Pop Grocery business.

This is not to say that rage at flash bankers trading adulterated stock isn't right and proper. And mutuals are a blessing to be embraced. But half the argument last week was directed at the necessary large government role in stopping it. "This," said one Carolinan, "is socialism."

No, it's a sensible regulation of banks as an alternative to a Hobbesian nightmare of collapse and Depression. But grasping that involves thinking long, looking at the amending legislation to temper the market.

It involves keeping calm, something intolerable to the Congressman facing in 30-odd days the terrible displeasure of Buncombe County.

Edward Pearce is a political commentator and historian who lives near York.