The talk everywhere – in the newspapers, on cable TV, on Wall Street, in European and Asian markets – is of an economic meltdown. That’s too narrow a perspective. We’re witnessing a far broader meltdown.

I’m not suggesting that life as we know it is coming to an end, or that people will soon be selling apples in the streets, or even that the lobbyists who populate Gucci Gulch – the corridors where they go trolling on Capitol Hill – will be barefoot by morning, though that might not be such a bad thing.

But we ought not to mistake what we are witnessing: a multi-dimensional revolt with elements of 1987, 1994 – and maybe 1976. It affects the financial markets and the political world. But its effects also reach into every portfolio, every state, every home. It is, moreover, historic – and by that I mean your grandchildren will read about what is happening this month in their history textbooks, if there are history textbooks then.

The market meltdown is obvious to anyone who looks in the mailbox this week; the 401(k) quarterly reports are out, and they will, quite literally, bring home the depth of the economic distress on Wall Street. They also will affirm that, despite the cutesy phrases being tossed around, there no longer is any difference between Wall Street and Main Street. In an age when, through their own investments or their pensions, more than half of Americans are invested in the stock market, no such separation exists. Wall Street sniffles, Main Street catches cold and consumers get cold feet.

House has breakdown

The political meltdown is well in train. Last week we witnessed the remarkable phenomenon of a complete collapse of party discipline in the most hidebound, most disciplined institution of American government, the House of Representatives.

The Senate has 100 drummers listening to their own march, though we can only wish that at least some of the hopeless windbags were humming (apologies here to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Jacques Brel) the “Chanson Sans Parole” – song without words. But the House has only one sound track. Everyone hears the same Sousa march – can it be a coincidence that one of Sousa’s 136 marches is called “Congress Hall”? – and, as a result, the chamber brooks neither independent thinkers nor independent voices. Indeed, the mere act of proposing an amendment requires the approval of a panel of elders.

But last week we had the spectacle of House Republican rebels defying their president and their leaders even as House Democratic rebels were defying theirs. This does not happen every day. Nor does a drop in the Dow Jones industrial average of 777 points.

How bad were things? So bad that two presidential candidates who spent a debate trying to distinguish themselves from each other were basically on the same page, pleading for the Congress to pass a bailout bill that was deeply unpopular with the very voters whose allegiance they are seeking in November. You do not see presidential candidates doing that every day either.

How transparent have these politicians become? So transparently desperate that they were lunging to include in the Senate version of the bailout bill a provision allowing bank deposits of up to $250,000 to be federally insured – a proposal that no one involved in the negotiations even thought to offer the first time around. But suddenly federal deposit insurance became the life jacket for the entire economy. Members of Congress are supposed to sense these kinds of hungers the first time around and not have to pull off a do-over to save the capitalist system.

Scary savings rate

One other segment of society under siege: the American public. The most terrifying economic chart in the entire federal government is the one that tracks personal savings rates. Last year Americans saved only $16 out of every $1,000 they earned. That would be chilling, except for the fact that the year before they spent at a rate of $1,017 for every $1,000 they earned. Americans’ savings have been eroded, to be sure. But Americans have barely been saving in the first place.

All of this is why we have echoes of 1987 (big market crash), 1994 (huge revolt against Washington incumbents) – and may even be looking at a repeat of 1976 (the country opts for an entirely different kind of figure in the presidency as an antidote for a discredited administration).

Both nominees qualify for the 1976 role, and both have the capacity to have a presidency as ineffectual as that of Jimmy Carter’s. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. All we really know today is that the next president is going to be a lot more serious about regulation of the economy.

In his masterly new biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which is to be published next month, the historian H.W. Brands says of the Democratic nominee in 1932: “He believed that the Depression signified a breakdown of the American capitalist system: The system’s unfettered competition had run the economy into a deep rut from which the American people could not escape without the intervention of government.”

Looking for leadership

Right now the economy is the most important issue in the presidential campaign and, perhaps as a result, Sen. Barack Obama has the whip hand in the election. The Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday showed Obama doubling his lead as the candidate best able to improve the economy, from 9 percentage points to 18.

There may be a reason for this. The voters surveyed by Pew most often used the word “confident” to describe Obama’s performance in the first debate, where the theme was predominantly foreign affairs and national security. That’s an important word, because what America seems to crave right now – and what the markets need right now – is confidence. It’s the coin of the realm in a nation consumed by crises, by debt and by worry.