The Obama Bubble

Most regular Americans know all about ‘bubbles’—for example, the ‘dot-com’ bubble of the 90’s, the telecom bubble of the late 90’s/early 2000’s, the housing bubble of 2006-2008. Alan Greenspan used the phrase ‘irrational exuberance’ to describe one of them, and in all cases they involve inflated, unsustainable valuations assigned to companies or properties which were thought invulnerable to the realities of the marketplace.

Reality was of course transcended by these companies; history had been rendered irrelevant; the ‘experts’ proclaimed a new paradigm of one kind or another; and the people were assured that the value of these brilliant, visionary companies or properties would, under the new paradigm understood by only the wisest among us, always and invariably continue to increase.

Believers in this nonsense are inevitably mugged by reality.

Americans have been observing the Obama bubble since before the 2008 election, and they know it has now collapsed. Americans stopped buying the Obama lies a long time ago. He’s anything but a great uniter; he’s anything but a new kind of politician. Likening him a messiah-type figure has gone from laughable to cringe-worthy to anger-inducing. Obama is a socialist, a Muslim sympathizer, an ACORN activist, a racist, a Chicago thug. He defrauded the American people in the election of 2008. He is not liked or respected, for reasons having not a damn thing to do with his skin color. His job approval rating, even though considered low in the mid-40’s, is a complete fiction, a prop created by the partisan political operatives (as Rush calls them) who write lies for the American Pravda media. It’s in the 20’s and going lower.

For all these reasons, the American people cannot wait to throw Obama and all the Democrats out, and they are going to fire a shot across his bow in the November elections. The ‘experts’ think 30-40 House seats might be in play; in reality, it’s going to be more than twice that. But the media just can’t get their arms around this possibility; it just can’t be squared with their worldview.

In the experience of investment bubbles, the people who get hurt the most are usually the ones that hold on longest in the resolute belief that surely, there wasn’t really a bubble, and surely, things will come back to where they were.

It’s amazing to watch the core of true believers in the Political Class who continue to hold on to the illusion that the Obama bubble hasn’t burst; that the crumbling polls are just a temporary valley; that some sort of magic wand—or maybe the race card wand—will restore Obama to the stature which the true believers believe he should have.

The mainstream media are in fact the final true Obama believers; how ironic that the November election results that confirm the collapsed bubble will so tag the media as blind, deaf and dumb to the spirit and character of the American people, that they may finally just lose everything. Who will continue to buy or patronize their ‘news’ when it is so fully and finally exposed as nothing more than a left wing instrument of propaganda, Orwellian doublespeak and outright lies?

Yes, we know the demise of the Pravda media has long been predicted but perhaps frustratingly slow to materialize, and at least some outlets, like the New York Times, have found foreign billionaire believers (a/k/a Carlos Slim) to throw them a financial life raft based on the illusion that the paper has a perpetual ‘brand’ having eternal value. But we think the November election results are going to put the lie to these institutions like nothing in history. If they survive, it’s going to be because of a complete overhaul in editorial leadership.

They’ve staked their editorial reputations and credibility with readers on an all pro-Obama, all of the time agenda—in other words, they’ve staked everything on the Obama bubble. They are holding when they should have sold a long time ago. It’s going to be ugly for them after November 2.

Paul Gable

August 9, 2010