So, what happened? This piece in The Washington Post explains it all. Americans don't trust their leaders.

The leaders of the country said: Trust us.

The people said: Not this time.

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 in the end was a $700 billion piece of legislation that few people could truly love, and it offered citizens from across the ideological spectrum a little something to hate. Conservatives said they could not abide the government intrusion on the free market. Liberals recoiled at government checks rescuing Gucci-wearing Masters of the Universe. There were those who sniped that this was a "No Banker Left Behind" program.

A political establishment held in higher regard might have been able to hold together some kind of coalition of the willing. But distrust of the nation's leaders, from the leaders of Congress to the president of the United States, foreclosed that possibility.

Members of Congress in both liberal and conservative districts were inundated with e-mails and phone calls from angry voters opposing the bailout. With Election Day a little more than a month away, many lawmakers appeared to pay greater heed to their constituents than to their party leaders.

In interviews across the Washington area and in several locations nationwide, Americans reacted to the congressional vote and the market plunge with opinions that carried a common denominator of consternation.

Here's Peter Kane, 60, an entertainment lawyer, getting a shave at Albert's Haircutting & Style in Santa Monica, Calif., the towel on his face puffing as he talked:

"There's got to be some kind of bailout, but the bottom line is that I just don't trust these guys." Look at the Iraq war, he said. "Everything this administration has touched has gone to hell."

Read the whole thing. Americans don't trust their leaders. Not political leaders, religious leaders, financial leaders. About the only group of leaders who have achieved some level of public approval (and this is ironic since the opposite was the case when I was a kid) are our military leaders, despite the mistakes in Iraq. This lack of trust is driving the anger which led to all those phone calls and e-mails to Congressmen and women opposing the plan. One commentator on CNBC hit the nail on the head this morning when he said that it is understandable why the public no longer trusts the financial folks, since as a reporter he has spent many hours arguing with P.R. people at major firms whenever he reported that they were in trouble. They, of course, would deny any such thing, as did their CEOs. The the firm would fail. We have been so inundated with spin in the last couple of decades that we no longer trust anything anyone says. We've just stopped listening. This bodes very ill for the continuation of our system of democratic government and free market economics.

Richard Cohen writes about the ugliness that erupted due to the Great Depression, and finds some lessons for today.

Rich Lowry explains why the bailout failed.

David Brooks says the failure was due to the revolt of the nihilists.

The editors of The Wall Street Journal say Congress deserves it's low approval rating.

Pat Buchanan says a day of reckoning will follow.

How Congress will react from here depends greatly on how the markets react, and whether or not the credit crunch begins to create problems more readily visible to average voters. At the moment, I think the fact that members have gone back to their own districts may persuade more of them to oppose a bailout, rather than the other way around, unless public opinion itself begins to shift.