Betting Long: Obama and Other Bubbles

The meltdown of the financial markets has led to a lot of fingers pointed in the direction of Wall Street, not least of all by the presidential candidates. No doubt about it, the investment community has broken all boundaries in inventing new derivatives so mathematically abstract that even economists cannot understand them. But is Wall Street really unique in placing big bets on fantasies of the future? A lot of Americans have been in on the game, most obviously those who were tempted into borrowing money to buy homes they couldn't afford.

But not all the blind hope involved finance. Who is Barack Obama to decry the imprudence of investment bankers? Obama himself was nominated for president without ever accomplishing anything of substance in his brief public career--or even trying to. What is Barack Obama's candidacy if not a speculation bubble? A man with no record and no plan "wins" the Iowa caucuses and gets proclaimed a viable presidential candidate by the media? Are Americans supposed to think that Barack Obama can actually serve them as president because several million college students and their vintage '68 grandparents think he's the reincarnation of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King rolled into one? Even Sarah Palin knows that reincarnation is a fib.

Right now Obama still occupies the role of "frontrunner," but what is that? Just a device of journalistic accounting. It doesn't mean that he's qualified to be president, or even that many people really think he is. The polls and newspaper analyses that support the credibility of Obama's candidacy are as fictitious and manipulated as the balance sheet of Enron. Sure Obama won millions of "votes" in the Democratic primaries, but primaries are not real elections, because the voting does not result in anybody taking office. Primary elections are basically fancy polls that use voting machines instead of telephones. Caucuses are even further from real elections.

The political capital won in primary elections is also deceptive because the opponents as well as the voters are all of the same party. All the speaking essentially addresses the already converted, so that a candidate like Obama never had to persuade voters to change their minds. Since in Democratic presidential primaries the candidates all conform closely to a single formula, a candidate is never fundamentally challenged: indeed, his positions are actually confirmed and strengthened by his rivals. So what's the cash value of the millions of "votes" that Barack Obama got? Nobody knows.

Once the public begins to get serious about the election, a lot of people who wish they could vote Democratic are going to realize that their party unfortunately forgot to nominate a candidate. It won't require a gaffe. Obama isn't unqualified because he's unintelligent; he's unqualified because he has a record of zero accomplishment, and un-childish voters are not indifferent to that in a potential president. Nothing that Obama does from here on can change the record he brings to the election. It's a fact that hangs over the guy's head like a bowling ball about to drop. It's there; a few people who have been hoping and not looking just have to look. Once that happens a panic will set in as Democrats realize that they will lose with Obama even if he wins the election. It may happen tomorrow, or November 4, or November 5 if the country is unlucky. But it will happen, to the embarrassment and consternation of many.