Frank Rich has long been a Larry Summers critic, and by extension, a critic of the Wall Street influence in and on the Obama White House: Summers, Geithner, Rubin, etc.

Today Rich makes an interesting case: The Election Day loss of a right-wing Republican in upstate New York is actually bad for the Democrats, because even the GOP will have to recognize that its moderates did well in New Jersey and Virginia while its looney right-wing got hammered in a district that should have been an easy win.

Which means that the GOP may start to show some semblance of sanity (not sure I’d bet on this, actually), exposing the Democrats’ real vulnerability: the fact that they have been coopted by Wall Street.

Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.

That’s a good line, that last one, not just clever but, I think, true. (I always thought it was a mistake for Corzine to make fun of Christie’s weight. Hell, 50% of America is fat. In New Jersey, 90%.)

Rich goes on to argue that the same principle applies to Michael Bloomberg’s underwhelming victory. Here I disagree. The Bloomberg race was close because of turnout, which was at about 25% of the electorate. Who voted? People who really liked Bill Thompson (apparently there were a few); people who really disliked Bloomberg or the term limits power grab (probably a larger group than the pro-Thompson voters); and people who felt strongly enough either against Thompson or pro-Bloomberg to go out and vote for the mayor.

But let’s face it, running for a third term on the promise that you’ll do more of the same doesn’t exactly drive voters to the polls.

Which means that it’s dangerous to attribute much larger meaning to the Bloomberg race, except that his support may be broader than it is deep, and there is a decent chunk of New York City which is ticked off at him.

But I think Rich is on very strong ground when he makes the following argument:

The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of thosepolled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.

If people aren’t getting jobs by next November, and the Republicans can keep their crazies in check, Election Night 2010 is going to be a lot uglier than this year’s.

There’s no question that there are a lot of smart people in the Obama administration. But sometimes they think so much, they forget to feel—and they forget that their boss was elected because of his passion, not his ideas. We don’t want a president who governs on heart alone, of course. But we certainly haven’t seen a lot of heart in recent days from the president and his Wall Street standard bearers.