Evan Bayh on the Financial Crisis

I have been rather quiet about the whole financial crisis fiasco, preferring to first educate myself on the subject before making any generalized comments on the matter. While I do intend to give my take on the subject in a post later today, suffice it to say everyone and their mother has an opinion on what needs to be done to prevent complete economic collapse. The latest, Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and his evaluation:

“There’s a consensus that we have to do what it takes to avoid a catastrophe. This is economic triage; we need to stabilize the patient. Then we can come up with a long-term prognosis and steps that need to be taken for a cure. When you’re trying to keep a patient’s heart beating and they are on the table, you deal with that first. But we must also maintain the sense of urgency to address the long-term changes that need to be made. The way Congress too often works is that there will be tremendous urgency to act in the short run, then all of the different interests who have a stake in not changing their ways will start circling to prevent systemic reform. The taxpayers and homeowners who are paying their mortgages have a right to be outraged if that happens. This crisis shows that what goes around comes around. Times were good, greed triumphed over fear, people leveraged up trying to make all that they could, and now we’re paying for it.”

In typical fashion, Bayh makes it a point to tip-toe around-- making sure to use sweeping bipartisan remarks that while politically neutral, do little to address the issue at hand. I know this is thin ice we are talking about, but is a little backbone from our elected Dems too much to ask for?