"I don't want to be an apologist, especially not for this zip code," said Joshua L. Steiner, co-president of the Quadrangle investment firm, as he scanned the well-heeled crowd gathered in lower Manhattan for The New Yorker Summit. Steiner, a former U.S. Treasury official during the Clinton administration, cautioned against the "temptation" to inflict pain for its own sake, or chase "speedy" fixes. Yet at this salon on Obama's agenda, Steiner is -- as conference keynoter Malcom Gladwell might say -- an outlier.

Most of the economic heavyweights here indicted Wall Street and Washington, without falling into any discernible partisan patterns.

Is a nationwide truckers' strike just over the horizon? As gasoline prices climb towards and past $4 a gallon, something is brewing that--with the help of the web--could very well upend the flatlining presidential primaries and force hard economic questions that none of the presidential candidates really want to wrestle with to the center of the national conversation.

Lots of people are being hurt by the emerging recession--people whose homes are being foreclosed, people who are being laid off, people who can't find a job--but for the most part their pain is private, and their efforts to seek solutions or answers tend to also remain private, even in the age of what writer Clay Shirky has aptly called "ridiculously easy group formation." By contrast, truckers have always been uniquely well connected to each other, via old-fashioned CB radio technology. But now the Internet may add a powerful boost to their nascent calls for a social response to economic pain.