Bailout plan makes strange bedfellows

Not far away, in a windowless room of the Rayburn House Office Building, a band of disgruntled House Democrats -- members of the self-styled Skeptics Caucus -- were airing their displeasure over the bailout plan and the demand for quick action by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

In normal times, Cheney is an iconic figure to Washington conservatives, and Democrats have shown remarkable cohesion since winning control of the House two years ago.

But the global credit freeze-up and the proposal to address it with billions of taxpayers' dollars have exposed deep fracture lines in both political parties -- complicating the effort to avert a wider economic disaster and creating serious challenges for their presidential candidates.

The divisions will be there even after an agreement on the bailout plan is reached -- probably this morning -- and will remain evident as the details of the rescue emerge and are put into motion.

The splits reflect the often-uneasy coalitions of smaller interest groups -- economic, regional, social and ideological -- that make up the major political parties. And the internal fault lines are especially likely to create problems on issues that run as deep as the current economic crisis, which includes not only moribund financial markets but also rising unemployment and the declining worth of houses that are most Americans' most valuable possessions.

As a result, the crisis exposed sharply different outlooks among Republicans who consider financial markets and big corporations the main engines of the U.S. economy, for example, and those whose sympathies are closer to small business, as well as conservative purists who see government intervention in the marketplace as an intolerable violation of basic principles.

For the Democrats, those who consider strong financial markets vital to the United States and its place in the global economy found themselves at odds with others who identify more with working Americans and nurture a long-standing distrust of Wall Street.