WASHINGTON: How did it happen, America’s grave financial crisis? President George W. Bush offered a bunch of explanations but held Washington completely blameless, painting a picture of a government standing innocently on the sidelines as the economy went off the rails.

Somehow, under Bush’s analysis, the country wound up at the precipice of “a long and painful recession” at a time when, apparently, the Congress, the White House, the regulators and the Fed were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Now that the economy has tanked, Bush says the federal government is responding with “decisive action.”Shouldn’t the people in charge have been doing that before everything became such a mess? “Our entire economy is in danger,” Bush said in an address to the nation on Wednesday.

Nowhere in his 13-minute speech did the president suggest that the people in Washington who are supposed to keep an eye on the economy missed a step, failed to raise alarms or hesitated to intervene. The guilty parties in Bush’s script were overseas lenders flush with cash, American borrowers reaching for more than they could afford, easy credit terms, a banking system eager to cooperate and too much optimism about rising home values.Bush spoke vaguely about investment banks that “found themselves saddled with” toxic assets and banks that “found themselves” with questionable balance sheets.

The economic collapse – well, it happened. “The gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt,” Bush said, talking to the country as if he were an economics professor in a freshman course.

Bush is a sharp-elbows politician, fiercely partisan and combative. The eight years of his presidency are filled with no-holds-barred, blame-game, finger-pointing attacks on Democrats. But not on Wednesday night. Not when Bush desperately needs Democratic votes to pass the $700 billion (that’s with a b) plan to buy distressed assets from financial institutions to shore up the banking system and unlock the nation’s severe credit crunch.

He could not risk offending Democrats because so many Republicans are baulking at his proposal. Bush held his tongue and spoke instead of the spirit of bipartisan cooperation between Democrats and Republicans. He invited presidential rivals John McCain and Barack Obama to an extraordinary White House meeting with congressional leaders on Thursday to find a way forward.

Appearing before the nation on Wednesday night, the president had a formidable challenge to persuade anxious Americans to swallow the bitter medicine of digging in their pockets to pay for a rescue package that could exceed the advertised costs and soar beyond $1 trillion. The painful truth is, no one knows how big the price tag will be.—AP