Cramer - Why Obama Is Bad for Stocks

I heard it five times this week, twice Tuesday in a Wall Street bar, two times during the day chatting with investors and then last night at dinner with a pal, an old pro trader from down the block. All said the same word, as if programmed, like pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The word?

Malaise.

All of the people who used this term were older, friends from the days of trading, wizened veterans of other terrible markets and of course, people who came of age during the Jimmy Carter years, where the unlamented president talked about the malaise in America and how the country was going in the wrong direction, coincidentally in large part because of failed energy policies that produced gas lines and a lack of energy independence. He talked about a dispirited America where people for the first time thought that the next five years would be worse than the last five years. When you read the speech -- it can be Googled simply by typing in "Carter" and "malaise," the speech was that well-known, and, yes, well-scorned -- it resonates today as if it were given by the man in the White House. I am surprised he's not giving it, but he knows better: Carter never recovered from it.

Malaise. The recognition that things are out of control and there is no getting better. The recognition that the president and Congress can't create jobs and that we can't stop the spill. The recognition that things are out of our hands. One true presidential historian/arbitrageur invoked the "pitiful helpless giant" speech, a true throwback, a miserable speech by Richard Nixon green-lighting the disastrous Cambodian incursion in order to defeat the indefatigable and ultimately undefeated North Vietnamese. Given our inability to subdue the Taliban, though, maybe the analogy's not that off-base.

It sure feels like we are stuck in a malaise and have been reduced to a pitiful helpless giant, hobbled this time by high debt, huge taxes, an anti-business agenda that is freezing job growth and an intractable economy.

To me, the coincidences are leading to what you see on your screen -- a collective sense of ennui and "it isn't worth it" because things aren't getting better, they are getting worse. That's how you get a market that interprets everything negatively and people who are fleeing, not going toward, even the best of values.

I do not mean to be political. It's not like the Republicans are proposing breakthrough strategies to get things done and break the malaise. But I do hear it, especially from people who have come back from Asia, where the can-do attitude of the '80s and '90s or even the '40s and '50s reigns.

Malaise.

Yesterday's rank insubordination by a key general in, of all places, a Rolling Stone interview -- ???!!! -- crystallized the moment, didn't it (no pun intended). I only heard two things: one that it was right for Gen. McChrystal to be fired and two that McChrystal was right for what he said. Given that a plurality of my colleagues voted for President Obama, the conclusions were pretty grim for what one soul called a "failed presidency."

Look, in this country it is never too late for Obama to reinvent, broom the people who have been setting his agenda, tack toward pro-growth, although his one attempt to break with the orthodoxy came when he embraced offshore drilling -- a luckless failed presidency?