This weekend we saluted Rep. John Campbell for his vote on the so-called Wall Street bailout bill (since dubbed the more politically correct “rescue package”). I’m sure it didn’t please some readers, but I have to say I’m awed by his political courage. Even now with 90% of the calls coming into his office still running negative he insists he did the right thing supporting the bill.

It’s gotten so bad, he said, his staff dreads picking up the phone.

Maybe we’ll find out Campbell was mistaken, but I’m not inclined to think so. I should acknowledge that I’ve been sounding the alarms around the office and elsewhere for about two years. I used to commiserate with a former copy editor here with a background in economics  about the looming disaster. We would both remark about how the housing bubble would burst while we also kept an eye on the price of oil skyrocketing along with inflation. As the economy continued to shed jobs I just couldn’t understand why no one saw this coming. In fact, I would argue, if it kept up we’d head into a protracted recession that could lead to a depression. The wildly bucking Dow Jones just added fuel to my argument, I thought.

Earlier in the year when our boss Sam Zell visited us he told a gathering of us here that all this talk about the fizzling economy was just propaganda from the Democratic presidential candidates. My co-workers made sure to razz me about that. Still, I held fast. I know Sam’s forgot a lot more about making money than I’ll ever learn and that when it comes to finance he’s Einstein to my Ernest but I couldn’t shake the feeling we were headed for the proverbial iceberg.

No one teases me anymore.

But, still, there are so many out there who doubt the urgency of this crisis. I suppose they’ll have to be personally affected before they get it. Losing a job or seeing your 401K lose 25% of its value over a week are pretty strong convincers.

Campbell began to recognize how bad things were going about July of ’07.

“That’s when I recognized this was much worse than people thought,” he said. “But I didn’t think it would get to this stage.”

Sometime early September is when he saw the gathering storm that would push the country’s economy to the brink.

“That’s when I realized it was so dire,” he said.

Campbell, who has an extensive background in economics — so much so that he’s frequently a guest on CNBC — has friends in the credit markets who alerted him to the catastrophe. They told him the credit markets were seizing up.

“I thought, ‘Oh my Gosh.’ I could see the dominoes falling,” Campbell said.

“I went to the Republican leadership and said this is going to blow up in the next couple of days,” he said, adding that they were at that time working up a strategy to hit Democrats on off-shore drilling.

“I told them this is above politics. It’s above Republicans and Democrats,” Campbell said. “This will be a lot worse than that.”

He cajoled them to reach across the aisle and start working on bipartisanship legislation to address the ailing markets.

Then those dominoes started falling. The government refused to bail out Lehman Brothers. AIG was considered “too big” to let fail.

Campbell will never forget that moment on the House floor when the first attempt at a bailout package failed.

“It was surreal.” It’s not often a bill is put up by the leadership of both parties and fails.

Campbell refused to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was criticized for her stemwinder right before the vote.

“What she said wasn’t appropriate and it was unhelpful, but you can’t lay the defeat of that bill on that,” he said.

After the Senate passed a new version of the bill and handed it off to the House where the Representatives voted it on to the President’s desk, Campbell made sure to thank Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland for his leadership on the issue. The spirit of bipartisanship was in the air.

We can only hope it lasts.

After it was signed into law, Campbell got his own call of thanks. President Bush wanted to salute Campbell for his leadership.

“It was the first call I’ve ever gotten from a president,” he said.

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