Nothing exemplifies the meltdown in President Obama's approach to the financial markets more than the Ben Bernanke fiasco. His nomination for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman has become uncertain. The administration is bravely proclaiming that it has the votes to ramrod his nomination to victory, and it probably does. But it’s not altogether clear that a “Bernanke victory” is going to mean much for anybody.

What makes the whole thing even more distressing is that the reasons for keeping him, with one exception, are not all that compelling. The single compelling reason is that if Bernanke goes, it will dramatically weaken the Obama administration’s ability to do pretty much anything, including enacting an urgently needed regulatory reform package. Dumping Bernanke will also probably send the stock market into a slump, but that might happen anyway.

The problem with Bernanke is that he has become less significant in his own right than as a symbol for other government officials, past and present, who are not up for nomination or even in government service at all. It was on his watch that the most unpopular government program since the Vietnam War, the bank bailout of 2008, was foisted on a weak economy to rescue out-of-control Wall Street financial institutions.

It wasn’t all his doing, as then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the chief architect of the bailout, shared responsibility with Bernanke for its general parameters. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now arguably the least popular Cabinet officer since, well, Hank Paulson, deserves a share of the blame as well.

Geithner and Paulson are not before the Senate, so Bernanke is in their place as a symbol of what they did collectively—create a bailout plan that, while clearly necessary, failed to require the banks to resume lending to consumers and small businesses. Instead, there was an assumption that, doggone it, banks will lend because it will be in their own best interests to do so.

Sound familiar? That was the mantra of someone else Bernanke symbolizes. His name is Alan Greenspan. In October 2008, Greenspan appeared before a committee of the House of Representatives and admitted that he was wrong, that bankers own self-interests were insufficient to keep them on the straight and narrow. But by then it was too late, and his successor was responsible for cleaning up the mess he left behind.

It was Greenspan, not Bernanke, who was responsible for monetary policies that encouraged the housing bubble, and above all for resisting strong regulation with an almost religious fervor. Greenspan, not Bernanke, was responsible for the policies of regulatory neglect, dating to the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking laws in 1999, which allowed banks to take the kind of risks that proved their undoing. Greenspan, not Bernanke, worked with then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt, then-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now Obama’s chief economic adviser, to keep the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating over-the-counter derivative instruments. Among them were the credit-default swaps that the banks, hedge funds, and a hedge fund-like insurer called American International Group found so darned difficult to manage.

Speaking of AIG, wouldn’t the Senate just love to revisit its nomination of Tim Geithner as head of the Treasury Department? Bernanke was Geithner’s superior (not boss, actually, as he reported to the Wall Street-controlled board of the New York Fed), so he was not exactly a passive bystander when Geithner organized the AIG bailout in September 2008. Congress is about to put Geithner on the hot seat to explain just why the AIG bailout turned out to be a kind of secondary bailout of Goldman Sachs, which was paid in full on its AIG swap contracts.