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Looking back, Mr. Bennett of Utah said he had no regrets. “Knowing what I know now, absolutely I would vote for it again, even if I knew it was going to end my political career,” he said.

The fate and scope of financial reform is now left to the Senate and House conference committee, which is putting together the final bill. It is an unsettling time as the struggle over derivatives reform, the Volcker Rule and untold nuances and seemingly minor provisions are left to jockeying among elected representatives. Yet, while there are many good things in the bill that should form the core of any financial reform and subsequent acts by Congress, there is one area — perhaps the key one — that this bill fails to address.

To this point, we have succeeded in keeping the public focused on the single issue that will have very little effect on how we do business: the quest to prevent taxpayer money from ever again being used to (as they put it) “bail out Wall Street.”

Susan and Gil Harper from Cushing, Me. — she a lawyer who telecommutes to New York, he a furniture maker — said they had limited their political involvement to voting. But the bank bailout outraged them, they said, and pushed him to attend his first Tea Party rally.

It's the same old same old: the really big players, the ones who contribute so much to campaigns and wield real power, are barely touched while upper-middle-income and small rich types get whacked.

Hello? Is this what passes for political arm-twisting and bare-knuckle negotiation at the Obama White House? It's bad enough that the president's top priority of health reform was hijacked by a sanctimonious senator who can't seem to decide which side he's on. But in a capital where it is more important to be feared than loved, it's even worse for a president to tear into Wall Street "fat cats" one day and then let them off their leash the next.

The federal government quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis.

It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street is not the banks but Washington. Many of the steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial system — reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institutions’ debts — helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth.

We’ll never know what would have happened if Bank of America had canceled the Merrill deal. What we do know is that the system didn’t melt down last December, and it seems reasonable to assume that the decision by Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke to hold Mr. Lewis’s feet to the fire was the right one. “They were making it up as they were going along last year,” said Ms. Bush. “There was no precedent.” By all rights, Congress ought to pat them on the back for saving the deal.

In one particularly testy exchange, Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur suggested that Paulson - the former head of Goldman Sachs - needed to visit her home state of Ohio to see how bad the economy really is.

“I know how terrible it is, I’m telling you it would have been worse’’ had the government not intervened, Paulson said.

Kaptur, who voted against the bailout program, responded: “If that’s your best argument, that’s not good enough.’’