What kind of change?

Barack Obama may not have been a major player in the reversion to partisan rhetoric which doomed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's attempt to martial a bipartisan vote for a banking bailout bill Monday (see above.)

But the incident should give voters pause over the potential for an Obama presidency.

Sen. Obama did some "reverting to form" of his own in Friday's televised debate against his senior Senate colleague, Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

As the economic crisis spread from the housing to the financial industry over the course of the summer, Sen. Obama has been "running to center" in a manner typical of leftist Democrats who look around and realize "tax-and-spend" isn't going to sell very well in the general election.

Sen. Obama spent the summer backing away from his promised tax hikes, claiming "middle class tax relief" would instead be his short-term priority.

But the Democrat was back in true form in Friday night's debate, promoting a bundle of "universal" spending plans that would have taxpayers financing health care and day care, while he made it clear increases to the capital gains tax and other levies are still very much on the table.

Given the level of let's-pull-together collegiality and statesmanship on display among Democrats on the Hill Monday (sarcasm intended), given the way Sen. Harry Reid has tried to slip his pet shale-oil moratorium into supposedly desperately needed financial bills in recent weeks, given the way Democrats attempted to lard up last week's initial $700 billion bank bailout -- voters have every right to wonder how far they would go if there were a smiling Democrat in the White House ready to rubber-stamp their every whim, removing the last roadblock to complete governance by the class-warfare party.

Does anyone think the bailouts end here? Unless government spending is trimmed back -- unless Congress swears off the kind of misguided social engineering that prompted all those unqualified mortgages under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 in the first place -- the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid bailouts will dwarf the mortgage and investment bank lifelines by such a margin that history may not even notice the automaker bailouts wedged in between.

American taxpayers don't have to wonder where all those trillions will come from. Even if it's initially borrowed to avoid an immediate doubling of tax rates, taxpayers (and our children) still have to pay it off eventually -- plus interest, and with meager savings that'll be massively eroded by the resulting currency devaluation ... before Sen. Obama gets to work punishing all those "rich guys" with stocks in 401(k) and pension plans by boosting the tax on capital gains.

Credit is tightening. People are scared. Scared enough to start asking, "Wait a minute. What kind of 'change' is he talking about, exactly?"