Over the weekend, two continents witnessed the cost of political bravery.

Saturday in Utah, Republicans ousted veteran Senator Bob Bennett. The National Journal rated Bennett the 23rd most conservative senator. Yet one vote, among other key factors, undid Bennett. As a conservative Club for Growth ad put it, Bennett "voted to bail out Wall Street." And no one could bail out Bennett.

The next day, in Germany's most-critical state, Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition suffered a stunning electoral defeat. A key factor? Germany's bailout of Greece.

The financial crisis has become the proving ground for the character of lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. The scars stateside remain too fresh, the bailout too ugly, for Americans to affirm that bravery today. European leaders are now, belatedly, showing the same grit. Their electoral pain has only begun.

It's easy to get lost in the pain of the present. The ugliness of the $700 billion US bailout, including the Troubled Assets Relief Program, has obscured its historic merit.

The US and EU bailouts -- if the European Union stays the course -- will come to be seen as perhaps the bravest, and most critical, Western legislative votes in decades. This is truest stateside, where the triage was hardly fluid but relatively immediate. Merkel, like so many European leaders, dithered for months. That's partly due to Europe's fragmented architecture. But decisive action proved possible in recent days. The European Union and International Monetary Fund offered a nearly $1 trillion bailout package Monday. Worldwide markets immediately surged. And while more dips might come, the EU action marked a moment when Europe took bold steps to secure a market floor, as well as their union.

That action began with an important vote. The week before, Greece's debt crisis brought markets to the brink of panic. Merkel's coalition offered a lifeline to Greece in the eleventh hour. The bailout was unpopular. But it passed.

By Sunday, Merkel's party suffered its worse showing ever in North Rhine-Westphalia. The state is Germany's Ohio. It's a barometer of the national mood. It's also Germany's most populous state. The vote served as a political warning shot.

"European leaders realized they had little choice but to act. But they did take unpopular steps that took a certain amount of political courage," said the Council on Foreign Relation's Charles Kupchan, a onetime director for European Affairs at the National Security Council. "The broad lesson from the Great Depression was that you needed to act before the financial system melts down."

That analysis, common among experts, is of little consolation to most Americans. Main Street paid for Wall Street's gambles. And Wall Street showed shameful ingratitude.

Similarly in Europe, "many northern Europeans don't want to pay the bill of the fiscal prolificacy of southern European countries," notes Brookings Institution's Domenico Lombardi, managing editor of the World Economics Journal.

In the end, the American bailout turned out to be far cheaper than expected -- likely between $87 and $315 billion. But the issue does concern deeper sentiments. Many of the innocent (or far less guilty) did not want to save the guiltiest. Wall Street soon exacerbated the issue by handing out record, and unseemly, bonuses.

Some politicians have sought to (radically) tap into the (understandable) populist backlash. Recently in Congress, Republicans Jim DeMint and Cathy McMorris Rodgers led pushes to block billions in US tax dollars from funding the Greek bailout. Their attempts, if successful, would have likely sunk markets. This is one reason the measure gained no traction in either party. That too is a credit to US lawmakers.

But its costs, not credit, that haunts today's electorate. And from Utah's Bennett to Texas GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison -- deemed "Kay Bailout" by Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry -- those political costs are visible nationwide.

Eventually, however, the credit will overtake the casualties. Many lawmakers did the difficult and right thing. That's especially true for those Republicans who voted yea.

Opposition to TARP was, for philosophical reasons, stronger on the right. Last month, among likely voters, Rasmussen found that nearly eight in 10 Republicans said they have more "trust" in a "member of Congress who voted against bailouts." Only about three in 10 Democrats and liberals agreed. Notably, 83 percent of conservatives had more trust in lawmakers who opposed bailouts.

Utah is among the nation's most conservative states. Bennett's TARP vote was one of three major factors that undid him. Utah did not have a primary. About 3,500 delegates decided Bennett's fate. And party bases are more likely to be incensed by political apostasy. Bennett also proposed a bipartisan alternative to healthcare reform. That won him no love from the base.

Looking back, Bennett said in an interview, "obviously, TARP was a major factor." At the time of the vote, Bennett added, "I knew I was going to buy myself a significant primary challenge." But he did not "really" envision losing his seat over it. What if he knew, back then, that TARP would play a critical role ending his 18-year Senate career? "I would" vote yea again.

"It was the right vote. The crisis was real. The Congress had to step up and deal with it," Bennett continued. "I don't want to sound pompous about this, but being a senator isn't essential to who I am. Having a sense of having done the right thing, for the sake of my country, is more important to my long term inner serenity."

Bennett's explanation rings corny to many jaded observers today. And that reaction only evokes the larger point.

Bennett won't call his TARP vote historic. And indeed, "historic" is tossed around promiscuously in politics. But the 2008 bailout, like Europe's recent action, was indeed that. And Bennett has a claim on that history, like all the 74 yea votes in the Senate.

"As distasteful as many parts of it were, the TARP vote saved us from depression and deflation and disaster," said the American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein, one of the nation's leading congressional scholars. "I'm absolutely convinced that it will be regarded as one of the most-courageous votes of our time, but that has come too late for Bennett and others."

John F. Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage" defined a courageous statesman as a politician with the nerve to take the unpopular stand, when circumstances required, "defying the angry power" of the "constituents who control his future."

This is a time of little political courage and much public cynicism. But here are votes that capture political courage, even bipartisan courage, both stateside and abroad.

And yet, the time for courage is not over. Financial reform is being debated in Congress. Strong action during triage is one thing. The courage to substantially correct the system is another. Will there be a responsible means to scale back "too big to fail?" We'll soon know if lawmaker's bravery meets this critical moment. But we might bolster that bravery if we recognize it, when we see it, in men like Bob Bennett.