At the same time, the Democrats in the U.S. Congress are preparing to back down on their fierce opposition to offshore drilling for oil.

In other words, the U.S. economic crisis is finally sobering up both major American parties.

If there is one thing Bush has stood for, above all others, during his seven and a half years in office, it has been to shrink the role of the federal government in all areas of American life, but most of all to take it out of high finance, and shrink its regulatory and protective roles over the U.S. economy.

Now he has jettisoned that stand in the biggest way possible by abandoning his threat to veto a congressional initiative to bail out the two giants of the U.S. mortgage sector, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The $3.9 billion initiative would give local governments the power to buy and refurbish properties.

The crisis is a no-win situation for Bush, but politically, opting not to fight the bailout is by far the less risky alternative for him. Vetoing the bailout would virtually guarantee the election of Democratic Party standard-bearer Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in a walk in the November presidential election. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of homeowners would be at risk if the bailout was not approved. And Bush knew it.

But the president will still pay a very heavy price for biting the bullet on the bailout: Hard-core conservatives across America will be outraged that he did it. And the Democrats will despise him as a turncoat and weakling.

In the years when Bush strode boldly and walked tall after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he treated liberals and Democrats -- and especially the Dems in Congress, when they were still in the minority during his first six years of office -- with open contempt. Now it's payback time.

Far more seriously, the inflationary effects of the bailout, combined with Bush's continuing implacable refusal to let interest rates rise to realistic levels, to raise federal taxes or to seriously rein in government spending, will put new pressure on the already dangerously weakened dollar and on international investor confidence in the financial stability of the U.S. government, which is already at historic lows.

But it isn't only Bush who has to choke on swallowing some of his most cherished ideological baggage: The Democrats are doing it, too.

Congressional Dems in both the Senate and the House of Representatives are currently agonizing over backing away from opposing Bush's move to lift the federal ban on offshore drilling for oil as far as 200 miles off the coasts of the United States.

The long-powerful environmental lobby in the Democratic Party opposes offshore drilling like the plague, and environmental activists have long argued that it would take seven years to actually pump out any new finds in significant quantities, that those quantities wouldn't be significant anyway, and however much oil was pumped out wouldn't affect global oil prices.

Each of those arguments is an assertion of faith or prejudice rather than an established fact. But more to the point, at a time when global oil prices and domestic costs at The Local gas station are both at unprecedented highs, the issue has become an unexpected boon to the Republicans.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican front-runner, has closed the gap with Obama and has been hitting Obama harder on energy policy than on anything else. Therefore, a growing number of Democrats now fear they have to fold on their lifelong opposition to offshore drilling or risk losing a presidential election they had been convinced they had in the bag.

There is a far broader issue involved here: However laden they are with the ideological baggage of their respective parties, McCain and Obama both unexpectedly won their primary contests by knocking out candidates who were far more set in their ways, conventional and rigid in their traditional conservative and liberal ideologies than they were.

Obama out-maneuvered, out-strategized and out-charmed Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who was almost universally assumed to have the Democratic presidential nomination locked up in advance. McCain confounded the pundits by beating out former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, all of whom had vastly superior conservative credentials compared with his own independent and maverick record on major issues.

The times are a-changin' in U.S. politics. Bush's fold on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout and the Dems' agonizing over abandoning their beloved offshore drilling ban both suggest that as the economic crisis worsens, the long, rigid arrogance along all too familiar liberal-conservative lines is finally breaking down in American politics. A new era is about to begin.