Chris Dodd may have his failings as a legislator, but as a showman he can’t be faulted. The Connecticut Democrat’s long-awaited financial services overhaul bill was announced on Monday after a buildup that would have pleased P.T. Barnum.

The New York Times said it would be “the most sweeping overhaul of financial regulations since the Depression.” The lone-wolf image of Dodd taking on those dastardly Republicans certainly helped. On Sunday, Dodd was still hammering the GOP for trying to delay the bill.

One pleasant surprise is that, contrary to previous remarks by Dodd, the bill would incorporate a key provision of the "Volcker Rule"—a prohibition against proprietary trading and hedge fund ownership by bank holding companies. That's a great idea, because trading by banks was one of the aggravating factors in the financial crisis. The Dodd proposal would also impose tough new leverage and capital requirements on banks.

If the Dodd bill would indeed be the most sweeping overhaul of financial regulation since the days of breadlines and fedoras—and it may well be—that would be more a condemnation of the comatose state of financial regulation than it would be praise for the Dodd bill. To be sure, it has some positive aspects. Shareholders would get a greater voice over corporate governance, at least in theory, by giving them input into executive pay. It has some bureaucratic paper-shuffling, moving supervision of smaller banks from the Federal Reserve to a new office to be created under the Comptroller of the Currency.

One substantive improvement over the status quo is that the Fed would have oversight over nonbank financial behemoths like American International Group. The Fed is imperfect, to say the least, but certainly someone has to keep an eye on those guys.

“Sweeping” as it surely would be, there is an air of ennui about this legislation, especially when it comes to consumer protection. President Obama’s financial-overhaul proposal would have created a brand-new, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But despite all the “go it alone” hype, Dodd has decided to go with the flow on this one.

Instead of a CFPA there would be a CFPB, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Federal Reserve. Bowing to ferocious pressure from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street lobbyists, some of it dishonestly directed as small business, there would be no independent agency to safeguard the interests of consumers and small business from the depredations of credit card issuers, brokerage firms, banks, and other financial companies, such as the increasingly diabolical payday lenders.

There’s only one problem with placing a consumer protection agency within the Federal Reserve: The Fed is already supposed to protect consumers, and it has a track record of doing a lousy job. In announcing the CFPB, Dodd emphasized repeatedly that this new consumer watchdog would be "independent." But if it were truly independent, we'd be discussing the CFPA proposed by President Obama. One letter in the acronym makes all the difference.

Dodd says it's just a matter of "rented space in the Fed," which makes me wonder: Is the Fed building the only place in the District of Columbia where the CFPB could find a vacancy?

At the same time that the Times was giving the Dodd bill a big buildup in its news pages, its editorial page was excoriating the Fed for doing an awful job of writing new credit card regulations. Under the credit card reform legislation passed last year, the Fed was supposed to have written regulations to ensure that credit card fees and charges are “reasonable and proportional.” So the Fed wrote rules, and they were, the Times noted, “disturbingly weak.”