Meltdown

How Pols Managed the Meltdown

Brown, Sarky score high.

It may be a little premature for report cards—it's unclear if yesterday's Dow surge was a turning point or an anomaly—but a column in the Financial Times grades the world leaders' performances anyway. The big winner is Gordon Brown, whose British bailout plan served as a model for other countries and quite possibly resuscitated his flailing career. His American counterpart did not do so well. President Bush weathered this one about as well as he did Katrina, says author Gideon Rachman, with a comment—"this sucker could go down"—that rivals "Heckuva job, Brownie," in showing off how out of touch he is. Sarkozy also performed well, but the meltdown's biggest winner might not yet be an underclassman: Barack Obama.