Stock market shakeout helps Obama

The last week's plunge of the Dow Jones Industrial average has left investors counting their pennies, and looking at their hole card.

It hasn't been a real rippy-dippy year in the Stock Market anyway, and the last week makes it much worse. There are always jitters at elecction time, and this will be the shortest presidential campaign in history, with just 60 days left until the election. Then the stock market will settle down at some level or another.

I'm no stock picker or market timer, but at some point investors will find stocks cheap and leap back into the market and it will go up. Are we at such a bottom right now? If I knew the answer, would I tell you?

The conventional politics is that a lower stock market helps Obama and hurts Republicans. Probably this is true, but so far the year is not running true to form. Republicans should have no chance whatsoever, given President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war's lack of broad-based public support and the economic slowdown.

However, the conventional choice of Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney didn't hapen, and now McCain has upset the apple cart again with his selection of a running mate in the person Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She is wildly popular with values voters and has changed the chemistry of the race.

It's too early to tell, but seemingly Obama got very little bounce out of the Democratic convention, trumped by the Palin announcement. Her appeal to Rust Belt, gun-toting hunters is sterling, and to a lesser extent, snubbed women voters backing Clinton.

With all the bad economic news, Obama would be the conventional beneficiary, but 2008 is proving to be a very unconventional year.