Some general thoughts.
The thread title is hyperbole, but Obama has to be sneaking into the garden for a celebratory smoke, if Michelle hasn’t told the Secret Service to wrestle the lighter to the ground. The crisis in Europe is real and had the potential to drag the rest of the world into recession. That had to have been Obama’s worst nightmare: an economic crisis that would doom any chance of recovery and that he would be blamed for without any way of affecting it.
Not that the world has been saved. From what I’ve read, the agreement isn’t a true plan but the absolute minimum possible to avoid immediate disaster. That’s going to lead to more pain for everyone even as a best-case scenario. It could still fall apart. And a half dozen countries in Europe are sitting at the edge. Staving off disaster doesn’t make the sun shine.
Nevertheless, the stock market loved it. The stock market is a reflection of future expectations. It is never rational, no matter how many times people tell you that. It continually overvalues and undervalues that future, with long-term rational being the average of those irrational extremes. It’s now bouncing back, going up more than 10% in October. Whether that’s real or not, next January’s quarterly 401K reports will probably correct the horrible losses that people just saw in their October report. Relief always translates into status quo.
The economy will still be bad in a year. It looks it hit bottom and is starting to slowly move up, but bad is bad. If Obama were running against the economy he would probably lose. He’s not. He’s running against Mitt Romney. That shows every sign of saving him.
I’ve been saying from the beginning that Romney would get the nomination. That was obvious. For humbling purposes, I need to remind myself that I also predicted that the right-wing would coalesce around an anti-Romney, which also seemed obvious. Politics always surprises, even in the dullest and seemingly most obvious election cycle, like this one is. Nobody saw the rejection of every far-right candidate as soon as they got the spotlight on them and became more than an animated tag reading “right-wing.”
Romney is already leading in every early primary state. The race will probably be over by February. Boring, boring, boring. Gotta hope for more craziness. By which I mean craziness that will affect voting. General craziness we got in abundance. Huge heaping amounts of craziness. Crazy like we’ve never seen before. But the voters don’t seem to be buying crazy. They’ll settle for boring over crazy.
Then it’ll be Mitt Romney vs. a sitting president. Two billion dollars worth of attack ads. Everybody holding their noses all the way to November. Close, as swing states get the brunt of the crazy. Gotta go with sitting president, though, as of today. If the world explodes in the next year, all bets are off.