Quick Read on Today

After a few hours of "monitoring events" I'm taking a walk. Here's my gleaning of what happened today:

Leaders who have been negotiating the bail-out had the basic agreement on a plan that phased in the big bucks over time, and met the other basic conditions that Barack Obama and others stipulated. On the strength of this, the markets rebounded.

But at the White House meeting, a bizarre looking event, things unraveled, perhaps temporarily, perhaps as part of a plan to make it look like McCain will later today announce he's rescued the plan. Or not. Nobody knows. Senator Dodd said that the meeting was more in the nature of a rescue the McCain campaign than the country, although McCain apparently had very little to say during the meeting.

At this hour it seems that McCain's gambit of Wednesday is itself unraveling. He hasn't really suspended his campaign--his ads are up, his campaigners are on TV and he's doing interviews. Plus his threat to diss the debate tomorrow has been widely castigated, so he has to find a face-saving way of showing up after all, regardless of where the agreement is.

If all of this was orchestrated in advance, then shortly before debate time tomorrow we'll hear McCain announce that he's brought the House Republicans into an agreement, and he has saved the day. Then he gets on the plane to Mississippi. However, there are indications that his latest moves, like others previously, have been improvised, so there's no telling how this will play out.

Meanwhile, there is real discontent in the country with the idea of a massive bail-out of Wall Street multimillionares. If this political gamesmanship goes on too long, then we may find out in real time just how bad things can get without some sort of solution.