Thomas Friedman’s proposed solution to the banking crisis reads like a parody of high Broderism:

Which is why I wake up every morning hoping to read this story: “President Obama announced today that he had invited the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to join him and his team at Camp David. ‘We will not come down from the mountain until we have forged a common, transparent strategy for getting us out of this banking crisis,’ the president said, as he boarded his helicopter.”

I will never understand why so many establishment pundits believe that all problems have a bipartisan solution. From a practical perspective, it’s not clear that a banking policy exists that “20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate” would unanimously prefer to the status quo. More importantly, why would we assume that such a policy is best? There’s no reason (beyond wishful thinking) to imagine that bipartisan compromises are always optimal, particularly on technical issues like banking policy. Sometimes one side is right and the other side is wrong.