Nate Silver has some interesting thoughts today on McCain’s bailout gambit.

McCain’s basic mistake, according to Silver, was that he confused tragedy and crisis:

What I think McCain also might have done, however, is to confuse slightly different things: a tragedy and a crisis. In a tragedy—say, a terrorist attack, or a Category 5 hurricane hitting a major American city—people expect the political process to be put on hold. That’s not to say there aren’t political implications to such things—decisions to be made, lessons to be learned. But those are the moments where we hope to come together as a country. Imagine if a politican were to run an attack ad during Hurricane Katrina—this would seem completely inappropriate.

The financial tremors on Wall Street, however, were not a tragedy, but a crisis: an ongoing, slowly building, relatively forseeable event, but perhaps one lacking the acutely emotional impact. In that sense, it was more along the lines of global warming than 9/11. And in a crisis, people do not expect the political process to be put on hold. On the contrary, they expect it to go into overdrive to get them the hell out of the crisis.

A semantic distinction, perhaps, but sometimes semantics have consequences.