After last night's speech, President Bush is set to meet with the two candidates for President today, in an effort to put political muscle behind a Federal bailout of the American financial system.

Opinion on the proposed bailout remains mixed, and I have mixed feelings, as well, as I do not know who to believe.

James K. Galbraith, who is a pretty smart guy, says we don't need the bailout. Anne O. Krueger, who is a pretty smart gal, says we do need it. I'm sure I could surf the net all day and find dozens of pieces from other smart guys and gals with opinions all over the map on this. This is primarily because the mess is so complex. What's the true cost, asks Robert J. Samuelson as he tries to explain the problem. The New York Times asks the same question in this piece.

The bottom line? Well, one of my colleagues at Bloomberg News in New York yesterday summed it up pretty neatly. When there's a fire, you don't ask who was responsible for it. First, you put out the fire, then you ask who caused it, and why. The depressed housing market, combined with unwise (and, perhaps, illegal) financial practices, caused a fire. Hopefully, this bailout package will put the fire out.

On the political side John McCain has temporarily suspended his campaign and has asked to postpone Friday's debate. Bill Kristol believes this bold move may have won the election for McCain. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann also believe it is a bold political step in the face of momentum that had shifted toward Obama. McCain, they believe, looks like a decisive leader, while Obama looks to be dithering around. Once again the old swashbuckling naval aviator has thrown the dice. We shall see over the next week or so whether or not it begins to move the numbers back his way.

As for the numbers, Clarence Page has joined the ranks of those who wonder if Obama will lose the "Bubba" vote, simply because he is Black.

"The Bubba vote is there, and it's very real, and it is everywhere," former House Majority Leader Dick Armey recently said. "There's an awful lot of people in America, bless their heart, who simply are not emotionally prepared to vote for a black man."...

In fact, if he fails to show at least a six-point advantage in the polls by Election Day, I expect John McCain to be our next president.

Where do I get that number? I'm no math whiz, but it did not take numerical genius for me to notice that Obama fared best in caucus states, where the voting happens to be conducted in public. Where votes were cast in the privacy of voting booths, Obama tended to do worse than polls predicted. When Obama showed a lead in the polls that fell within the margin of error, it tended to mean a victory for his principal opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Now new evidence has emerged to back my six-point theory. A new and unusually comprehensive AP-Yahoo poll that takes a look at racial attitudes offers this unsettling news: "Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice."

Read the whole thing. Page is very fair in that he indicates there are plenty of folks who won't be voting for Obama for other reasons. But I tend to agree with him. Obama was well ahead of Clinton in the New Hampshire polls just before our primary, but when the real votes came in she won. As Page points out, Obama won almost all the caucus states, where people vote in public, but lost many of the primary states, where they vote in private. All voting in the general election, whether by mail, absentee, or in the voting booth, is in private. If the six point model is even close to being right, and we have absolutely no way of knowing for sure, then Obama will not win.