David Frost became a celebrity for life on 24 November 1963 with his London-based show on the last week that equaled this past one for bewilderment—the assassination of the American president (believe me, it was bigger than 9-11).

His group was reflective, sad, indeed poignant. They got everything right and my generation will never forget the show. America moved on, but with a lot of pain. That’s what is happening this time too. What would David Frost say this time?

I think they’d be more purposive now, because all the signs were already there. First there was the disintegration of the Sarah Palin myth.

John McCain seeing his nose-diving polls in late August knew he had to make a desperate move to shake things up, and he succeeded. He couldn’t have reached deeper into the well of helplessness, with the choice of a pit-bull vice-presidential choice who wore lipstick, and for a little while Palin played just very well indeed.

The Palin myth

But what had he really offered up? What if a newscaster asked her if she knew the name of any of her state’s closest neighbors’ leaders—the presidents of Mexico, Korea and Russia, or the prime ministers of Canada and Japan?

For people began to think about it. Did we really want as back-up for a 72-year old president a woman who got her first passport last year, and who didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is?

McCain is fabled for his hot temper so it was logical to ask whether his number two should be someone who also reacted like a pit bull to criticism and for that matter hired all her high school pals to build a kennel around her? A new style of spectacles and hair, it turns out, is good only for a few weeks.

Even the popular Republican senator Chuck Hagel has gone public about her credentials. You can shake things up by putting a nonentity on the stage, who plays to the equivalent ignorance of a sector of the electorate. But there’s a larger electorate that sometimes uses its brain.

‘Palin is like a great majority of Americans,’ a woman told me last night. ‘Self-satisfied, successful, and uninterested in the rest of the world. But usually there’ve been enough Americans who know their limitations to make sure that their kind doesn’t try to run the world.’

The economy

Then there’s the economy. That wasn’t a random bullet either. All the signs were there; it was just a matter of time. Wall Street could nosedive 900 points in a few days—but then what goes down can go up and it did.

In all my life I’ve never witnessed more popular schadenfreude than when Hank Greenberg, AIG one-time biggie, came out to the press lamenting—or was he whining?--that he’d lost ‘everything,’ that he was completely wiped out.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Are we sure he hadn’t done some back-room investing like that of the corrupt dictators he coddled along the way—read Ferdinand Marcos?

And who cried for Lehman Brothers, which, in go-go days so willingly took your money and strutted so high? They put too much into sub-prime loans too and are now paying the price for junk-style investments.

So who’s crying for Wall Street and the million dollar bonuses go-go traders were enjoying at our expense? The point is Wall Street is important but it’s not the only force in the $14 trillion US economy.

All we’ve been hearing about the economy is foreclosures, bad debt, write-downs—but little about the 3+% growth the world’s biggest financial system still enjoys. It just keeps chugging along.

Too many marginal borrowers got big loans, but that doesn’t directly affect car sales, IT, restaurants, or coal mines. Or house buyers who can put 20% down and afford the monthly payments.

The losers

The people getting shafted are the marginal ones who were taking a big plunge. ‘Nothing ventured nothing gained’—but theirs was foolish adventure not real risk. It’s not just corporate fundamentals that matter: it’s the long-term earning capacity of borrowers in the $10 trillion house economy.

I hate to agree with anything John McCain says but he’s right that the ‘fundamentals of the US economy’ are sound. The protections that were installed in the system progressively from 1929 ensured that if there were another big bang, like October of that year, government, the lender of last resort, could do something about it.

Eyes are popping when they see a trillion dollar bailout—eight years of the Malaysian economy. But a twelfth of the US economy? Not a bad price to pay.

So what happens now?

David Frost’s panelists would say that the Obama folks are sleeping better, and that the 95% of American home-owners who are not faced with foreclosure, and who had to endure wrenching financial examination when they bought their residences, are proud that along the way they had to make a few sacrifices.

By next April, when I make the last of twenty five years of mortgage payments on my farm outside the nation’s capital, I think we’ll have moved ahead and be on much sounder financial ground for the future. So will the rest of the world.

And Sarah Palin will have returned to the obscurity of the Alaskan tundra which she so richly deserves.