Let’s cut to the chase scene. The American people expected Thursday night’s debate on the leafy campus of Washington University in St. Louis to answer this question: Is Republican Gov. Sarah Palin a capable candidate for vice president?

Early on, Palin signaled her strategy: not to debate with Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, whose 36 years in the Senate give him an advantage. “And I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear,” she announced. “But I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.”

She displayed the political strength we saw in her address to the Republican National Convention. She knows how to speak to America’s heart.

Example: first question, Wall Street’s conniptions. Biden responded with an artful articulation of Sen. Barack Obama’s four conditions for a rescue plan. Palin opened instead by talking about the fear Americans feel about keeping their homes, jobs and savings. People may respond warmly to that, but she didn’t give much sense that she has a deep understanding of the financial crisis.

On several questions, Biden’s depth of experience showed. That was clearest when the veep candidates discussed global warming: Palin dithered and dodged, Biden hammered home a crisp message. Palin had a problem with the question because she has a problem with the issue. In the past, she has said she doesn’t believe global warming is a man-made issue. Last night she said, maybe sorta.

Palin did land several zingers: When Biden sniffed that she hadn’t offered a plan for exiting Iraq, she smiled at him and retorted, “Your plan is a white flag of surrender!” Biden, in turn, smiled broadly when Palin reminded him that, long before joining the Democratic ticket, he’d called Obama unready to be commander in chief. Later, when Biden described years of congressional acrimony over Iraq, Palin gambled that many Americans are weary of re-debating the origins of the war: “I’m not used to how you guys [in Washington] operate,” she said. “You voted for the war, and now you’re against it.”

Neither candidate Thursday night had an answer for the same question that flummoxed their running mates last Friday night: What plans will the federal government’s growing bailout obligations force your administration to drop? Biden and Palin primarily responded by debating tax policy. Given the fast-rising national debt and its Draconian impact on future federal budgets, this was the most dispiriting passage of the evening.

Least heartening answer came from Palin: “And how long have I been at this, like five weeks?”

Yes, and that’s what seems to have a growing number of people concerned.

Bottom line: We were heartened to see a respectful discussion. Biden was in his comfort zone. He was more direct. He’s been where the action is. Palin clearly has not. He had the depth, she had the empathy. But she did not provide more confidence that she would be ready to step into the most demanding job in the world at a moment's notice.

Friday night in Oxford, Miss., moderator Jim Lehrer tried to force the men who would be president to confront how a costly bailout of America’s credit markets will constrain their grand plans for the next four years. That’s likely to be the shadow lingering over official Washington for much if not all of someone’s first term in the White House.

If you saw the debate, you didn’t see Barack Obama or John McCain hit that question out of the park. You saw, instead, maddening exercises in small-ball. This nation’s debt is fast approaching $9.8 trillion—and any bailout likely will, in the short run, push that number into (gulp) the low 14 digits. You didn’t hear anybody acknowledge that Friday night.

Instead, Obama initially responded by listing areas from energy to education to infrastructure where he’d devote new spending, eventually acknowledging that he’d have to delay some of those expenditures. McCain proposed a freeze on federal spending outside defense, veterans’ care and entitlements—a collective so massive that, when coupled with mandatory debt payments, wouldn’t leave much to freeze.

Obama and McCain have barely five weeks to develop better answers. We suggest they get cracking.

As the debate shifted to national security issues, McCain demonstrated why many voters see this as a strong area for him. He’s been involved for decades in deciding whether the U.S. engages militarily in hot spots such as Somalia, Lebanon and Bosnia—and it shows. His cautious words about the careful use of power indirectly addressed the fear of some Americans that he’d be a trigger-happy president. Similarly, Obama’s pledge to add troops in Afghanistan and his forceful language on terrorist breeding grounds in Pakistan addressed the fear of other Americans that he’d be a weak commander in chief.

On Iraq, Obama spoke repeatedly about his opposition to initiating that war. But he didn’t directly respond to McCain’s key points—that a surge-enabled victory in Iraq will leave this country with a stable ally in a bad neighborhood, and that the next president has to decide not whether to enter Iraq but how to leave in a way that best serves America. Obama gamely noted that he had chosen Sen. Joe Biden, a specialist in foreign affairs, as his vice presidential candidate.

The bulk of Friday night’s debate took place on the turf McCain knows best: foreign affairs and military endeavors. That showed. Obama spoke capably on one topic after another; McCain, who has traveled to numerous crisis locales and joined in more foreign policy debates, spoke with more fluency and experience.

As one TV talking head said afterward, McCain spent the night on offense; Obama found himself playing more defense. The debate that almost didn’t happen was a serious—and decorous—affair. Over 90 minutes, though, Americans who’ve been following the campaign didn’t hear much that McCain and Obama haven’t said, and said, before.

Given the recent swing of poll numbers against him in recent days, McCain had to make the better showing in the Mississippi night. By some small measure, he did.

We asked him which was the greatest disaster, the national housing market or the Republican Party of Illinois. He was smart enough not to answer.

We have no inside knowledge of the machinations in the Congress over the proposed $700 billion bailout plan that the government’s top financial stewards recommend. We do, though, think we can speak for many Americans who don’t want their lawmakers in Washington to have one eye on the current credit conundrums and the other on the election calendar.

Bush was disciplined where it mattered most: He rejected the temptation to start apportioning blame. There is more than enough to go around—to former and current administrations, to former and current Congresses. He explicitly urged both major political parties to craft a solution—and drove home the point by including their presidential candidates. This is a 3 a.m. phone call.

Not every American comprehends the depth or breadth of this financial dilemma. But when awareness catches up with fact, the pols of all persuasions had better be able to say that they set aside partisanship this week and for as long as it takes to right a jittery economy.

To be clear: When the dust settles, Americans will score what happened this week. They’ll decide that John McCain, Barack Obama and all the rest did put America first—or that they really focused on whatever advice was arriving from their campaign aides.

If, as we expect, bipartisanship rules, neither candidate for president will have anything to fear from that assessment. If one candidate or one party exploits this moment to score points, the public’s judgment will, and should, be harsh.

Guilty by association

The Chicago evoked in John McCain’s latest campaign ad is shrouded in ethical clouds and federal investigations and peopled by shady characters with labels like patron, lobbyist, felon, godfather and (shudder) mayor’s brother. In less than 30 seconds, the spot —titled "Chicago Machine" —paints the image of a city that runs on nepotism, cronyism and corruption.
Chicago is guilty as charged.

Fair enough. What isn’t fair is that McCain, the Republican nominee for president, is trying to apply all of the above to his Democratic rival, Barack Obama.

"Born of the corrupt Chicago political machine," the ad begins. In a lame attempt at guilt by association, it then ticks off a list of Chicago pols whose ties to Obama supposedly bring into question his qualifications for president.

There’s his "money man," Tony Rezko, convicted of federal corruption charges in June.

His political mentor, Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, who has stacked the state payroll with relatives and served as a one-man roadblock on ethics legislation for more than a year.

His economic adviser, William Daley, brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

And Gov. Rod Blagojevich ("a legacy of state and federal investigations").

"With friends like that, Obama is not ready to lead," the ad concludes.

Aside from an ill-advised relationship with Rezko, there’s little here that reflects negatively on Obama. As a former U.S. Commerce Secretary, William Daley is an excellent go-to guy on economic matters, though the McCain ad conveniently omits that qualification in favor of the label "lobbyist." And if Jones or Blagojevich were capable of pulling Obama’s strings, you wouldn’t have known it last week, when Obama publicly pressed Jones to stop standing in the way of an ethics reform bill that Blagojevich was trying to kill.

Jones obeyed Obama—and on Monday the Illinois Senate voted 55-0 to turn that ethics bill into law.

Obama deserved the heat for dealing with Rezko, a friend and fund-raiser who was convicted of money laundering, aiding and abetting bribery and mail and wire fraud. Obama has acknowledged that the relationship was fraught with potential conflicts of interest, and that lapse in judgment has dogged his campaign.

But the suggestion that Obama is a politician in the classic Chicago mold is way off base. He wasn’t a machine candidate in his bid for the Illinois Senate in 1996, and he won the 2004 nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in a heavily contested primary without Daley’s support. Though he now enjoys the support of establishment Democrats, Obama is a man governed by his conscience, not by his associations.

Obama wasn’t "born of the corrupt Chicago political machine," and that makes his rise all the more remarkable. But the McCain camp is betting voters know less about Obama than they think they know about Chicago, which can usually be summed up in three words: Dead people vote.

Chicago, regrettably, deserves that rap. Obama does not.

Meridor called for businesses, financial institutions and insurance companies in Europe, Asia, Russia, China and the U.S. to stop conducting business with Iran. If the European Union placed stricter sanctions on Iran, Meridor said it would make a “significant” difference in Iran’s economy. Because Iran imports 30 percent to 40 percent of its gasoline, Meridor also called for companies to cut off gasoline exports to Iran. The goal, Meridor said, is to turn Iran’s arms program from an asset to a liability for Tehren.

What do you think? Should countries be taking more aggressive action to deter Iran’s nuclear program? Would business and trade sanctions make a difference?

Ah, how many billions?

Do you think that by Monday the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, will be able to tell us how many hundreds of billions of dollars his financial bailout plan will cost taxpayers?

The market, of course, loved his announcement on Friday that the government was crafting a massive plan to rescue banks from their disastrous lending decisions. You didn’t hear much argument against it in political circles. Maybe that’s because we don’t have any details yet. But you have to wonder if Paulson has set up Congress for an offer it can’t possibly refuse.

Think about it. What are the chances that leaders of Congress, six weeks before a national election, are going to say "no" to this deal and set off a 500-point drop in the Dow and, oh, cause the international lending system to choke again?

We’ll stick with our assessment on Friday’s page, that the officials trying to calm a fear-stricken financial system have handled an extraordinarily difficult situation pretty well. But understand that Paulson did say this bailout would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. That is as specific as he would get before he cut short a press conference Friday morning.

The essentials:

• Create an entity to take the riskiest assets off bank balance sheets, then dispose of them when markets have calmed and, it is hoped, those assets have regained some of their value. This could be modeled after a Depression-era reconstruction bank or the Resolution Trust Corp. set up nearly two decades ago to sell insolvent thrifts during the S&L crisis.
• Make money market funds as safe as FDIC-insured commercial bank deposits by temporarily providing deposit insurance for them, too. This sounds like a smart and low-risk proposition for the government. It should restore confidence—and not a moment too soon. Threatened runs on the $3.5 trillion in money market funds could have hurt average investors who believed they were playing it safe—and made it impossible for many corporations to fund their day-to-day operations.
• Temporarily ban short-selling in financial stocks, making it impossible for investors to bet that those bank stocks will fall further. This strikes us as some particularly heavy-handed manipulation of the markets. Sure, you’re going to get a 368-point gain in the Dow when the government makes it hard to bet against a gain. Just hope that doesn’t come back to haunt the market.

The details of this new framework are being hammered out over this weekend. Congress will be asked to ratify it within days.

We hope the folks on Capitol Hill will still have the nerve to ask hard questions next week. A big one: What will be the ultimate cost to the banks that made poor lending decisions? If you let them off—ma government will ease your pain—they’ll have every incentive to get reckless in the future.

Nearly two decades ago the S&L crisis resulted in the failure of nearly 750 thrifts and cost taxpayers $124 billion. That sounds like it could be a rounding error compared to the ultimate cost of the plan being hashed out this weekend. Figures north of $1 trillion have been bandied about.

Should be an interesting Monday.

After his swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday, most of the world began referring to Pakistan’s Asif Ali Zardari as "Mr. President." Many of his compatriots, however, continue to use the jeering moniker by which he has long been known: "Mr. Ten Percent."

Derided as a crook and a liar, a weasel and a wastrel, Zardari, the widower of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, takes office even though most Pakistanis are deeply skeptical about him. For much of his political life, Zardari was known as Bhutto’s feckless, freeloading consort, often accused of extracting kickbacks from anyone wishing to do business with his wife’s government—hence, "Mr. 10 Percent."

That helps explain why only 26 percent of Pakistanis supported Zardari in a recent poll by Gallup Pakistan. Not that citizens thought they had great alternatives: given a choice of three top candidates, 44 percent opted for none of the above.

But the presidency is selected by Pakistan’s national and regional assemblies. So Pakistanis are stuck with him. And he’s the man that Americans must rely on as a primary partner in our efforts to defeat Al Qaeda in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Can anybody trust him?

Zardari spent 11½ years in jail in Pakistan. He was accused of corruption—but was never convicted and maintains the charges were "politically motivated."

Many Pakistanis suspect that he was behind the 1996 shooting death of his late wife’s brother, Murtaza Bhutto, on the streets of Pakistan.

He, along with his late wife, were investigated for corruption in Switzerland, France and Great Britain. The Swiss brought charges against Bhutto and Zardari in 1998, but they were never tried. The charges against Zardari were dropped late last month.

The Financial Times reported that, as recently as last year, Zardari suffered from dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Those diagnoses were used by Zardari to fight an effort by Pakistan to sue him in English High Court. That effort was dropped March.

His aides swear he’s now fine. He better be, because he’s going to need all of his faculties to face the challenges facing him. Pakistanis have been battered by spiraling inflation, a stock market in free fall and a rising domestic insurgency that has claimed more than 1,000 lives in the last year.

If he’s serious about cooperating with the U.S. war on terror, he will have to find a way to marshal domestic support. Pakistan’s tribal areas have become safe havens for Al Qaeda operatives, who use them as staging ground for attacks on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

And he’ll have to prove that he’s a sound steward of U.S. aid. During the reign of former President Pervez Musharraf, the U.S. funneled more than $10 billion to Pakistan to aid the country’s development and fight terrorism. Where did the money go? Auditors for Congress have said that Pakistan spent little of the money on counterinsurgency efforts. Officials in the U.S. and India suspect that some of the money was instead spent on weapons systems for use in Pakistan’s skirmish with India in the disputed region of Kashmir.

Pakistan will continue to need U.S. aid. But we must ensure that the money we send Zardari is used properly.

Mr. Ten Percent has a lot to prove.

The editorial board is debating what position to take on this issue. What do you think? Should Illinois hold a constitutional convention? What would you change in the state constitution?