FDIC Chair Sheila Bair was already marginalized by the Obama Administration — despite the curious fact that she's pursued a more progressive and people-friendly agenda than the yes-we-can president has. Compared with Obama's conservative aides Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, Bair's out in left field. And now, with her op-ed in the yesterday's Times ("The Case Against a Super-Regulator"), Bair just has to be headed for a permanent benching.

Why the American Prospect's Tim Fernholz calls Bair's op-ed "opaque" is opaque to me. Bair is pretty clear in her criticism of giving the Fed all-encompassing power. But where she really hits home is when she pins the blame for the Wall Street meltdown on the big banks. (No wonder the administration doesn't want her to have any hand in regulating the big banks.) Bair, a former aide to Bob Dole, comes straight out with it:

That's the problem, all right, but Bair isn't just rehashing. Her fear is that a super-regulator would focus on just the biggest banks and that would mean even more consolidation in the banking industry.

For more on that specter, go back to David Cho's "Banks 'Too Big to Fail' Have Grown Even Bigger" in last Friday's Washington Post, and Felix Salmon's "The systemic threat posed by megabanks."

Progressive outlets keep wailing at Obama with suggestions to do this and that. They haven't realized that the Obama economic crew (especially Summers and Geithner) is hardly an improvement over Henry Paulson. Bair has at least been consistent. She started shouting into the wind last October against Paulson's bailout plan with her cries for social welfare over corporate welfare: