By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service

Today we are piecing together two seemingly unrelated news stories that ran on successive days -- because they will lead us to a solution for finally getting to the bottom of the financial crisis that has crippled our nation and the world.

The air is crisp, the sky bright blue, the leaves have passed their red-orange peak and are falling around the headstones of those who gave our nation their lives.

Here in the company town of Washington, D.C. the assembly lines spent 2008 mass producing their one industrial product that can't be outsourced and has made the city gloriously recession-proof.

As we enter the final daze of the marathon presidential race of 2008, there is one last campaign reform that we in the news media still have time to push.

It is about us, not them.

Just three Sundays before Election Day, the Great American Video Game that is U.S. presidential politics was being played out before a nation of news-talk channel surfers.

It was one of the few days of a cacophonous Campaign 2008 in which the hardcore themes of message politics converged and actually reinforced each other. Right before our eyes.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has been videotaped palling around -- well, maybe not palling around, but certainly engaging in mutual discourse -- with a man known to have filed false income tax returns.

Obama has been seen in the company of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

America's rudderless ships of state sailed themselves onto the shoals of shallow governance Monday. The wreckage was a failure heard -- and felt -- 'round the world.

It was a true September Surprise. A calamitous financial crisis that not only toppled Wall Street's corporate icons and sent global markets plummeting but may have given Barack Obama's seemingly mired campaign the one thing he may never have secured on his own: Victory.