The changes the Senate made in its version of the bill to the earlier legislation that the House rejected Monday by 228 votes to 205 were substantive and not merely cosmetic.

The Senate version raises the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. deposit insurance ceiling to $250,000. It also got tax breaks for businesses and alternative energy tagged onto it. The alternative energy provisions are meant to please the 95 Democrats in the House who voted against the bill Monday. But the main aim of congressional leaders has been to persuade enough of the 133 Republicans who voted against the bill to change their minds.

Their best argument for doing this, however, was not what was in the bill, but what Wall Street did on Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 777 points before closing on news that the bailout legislation had failed. Apparently a lot of the representatives who voted against the bill had never expected this would happen.

That plunge took $1.2 trillion off the value of U.S. stocks, threatening to wipe out the value of 401(k) retirement accounts for scores of millions of Americans, most of who vote. That didn't seem to have occurred to the 228 members of the House who voted against the legislation either.

Ironically, many of those skeptics, especially Republicans, may now be lulled into the idea that things aren't really so bad: The Dow rallied on Tuesday and rose 485 points, regaining more than half the value of its unprecedented plunge the day before.

But they shouldn't shrug off "Black Monday" on Wall Street either. The volume of trading on Wall Street for the last week or so has been relatively light, suggesting a lot of money is waiting on the sidelines to determine the best path. If a majority of House members continue to behalf like spoiled, illiterate, bad-tempered children who can't add up two and two to make four, Monday's plunge could look like a light shower compared with the Niagara of selling that could follow.

Constituent communication seems to be shifting, with more messages of concern coming in about Congress' failure to act on the financial crisis. However, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Democrats opposed to the bill on Monday got overwhelming support from constituents in the aftermath.

The Senate always had the votes to pass the bailout plan -- but then only one-third of them are seeking re-election, unlike the House, where everybody must answer immediately to his or her constituents.

The bailout can still work -- although there is no guarantee that it will. The bottom line is that the U.S. Treasury would take over control and responsibility for a lot of real assets across the United States. Given a modicum of prudent management, the prospects for those assets regaining a steady level of value in a few years, especially housing across the country, ought to be quite good.

However, if the bailout is rejected, the consequences would go far beyond a much deeper plunge of the Dow Jones index on Wall Street. Major money managers in Shanghai, London, Tokyo and other major financial centers around the world could despair of any sense of fiscal responsibility in Washington at all. More than 30 percent of U.S. Treasury bonds are held by the State Bank (OTCBB:SBAZ) of China. Japan holds an even larger portfolio. A vast flight of international investment from the United States could collapse the federal credit entirely and render the dollar virtually worthless. The entire nation could be thrown into real, and not just fiscal, chaos within days. More than half the House of Representatives on Monday on both sides of the aisle showed they didn't realize how close this danger really was.

Even if the bailout measure is finally passed, either this so far exceptionally unimpressive 111th Congress or its successor is going to have to bite a lot more bullets on a lot more unpopular issues.

Federal credit and international investor confidence in the United States are going to have to be restored. That means federal spending is going to have to be finally slashed across the board. A huge raft of programs beloved to hard-line conservative Republicans and pro-health, pro-education, pro-environment Democrats alike are going to have to be thrown overboard.

The process of educating Congress and the next administration, of either party, about the realities of the world has hardly begun.