In Obama We Trust

To follow up on the previous post, I think one of the people who actually has gained enough trust to make some long-term, potentially contrarian positions, is President Obama. And I think one of the reasons why Obama has so much trust is because he walked into such a trust vacuum.

The old guard has been discredited or defeated, one by one, for the past eight years. The only people who "got it right" over the past decade have been the outcasts and fringe figures who started as such outsiders that it is difficult for them to become real, mainstream leaders.

Think about it. The true political genius of the past decade was outcast Joe Trippi, the Howard Dean campaign manager who first saw how the Internet would forever change politics.

The people who saw the financial crisis coming were figures like George Soros, a man who you would think was the Devil himself if you watched Fox News from 2002-2006. In fact, all of the people who got the crisis right, I've noticed, have the moniker "Dr. Doom" in the popular financial press. Before they perfectly nailed our financial mess, you would have thought they were fear-mongering outcast villains from a Bond movie. They should be called "Dr. Right." The hundreds of analysts who got it wrong should be called "Dr. Rose-Colored Glasses" or, more simply, "Dr. Wrong." It wasn't American that wisely managed to avoid the financial crisis. It was Canada.

Furthermore, it was basically just the weirdos and fringe figures who opposed the Iraq War, now widely considered a foreign policy disaster. Mainstream foreign policy figures like Thomas Friedman, Colin Powell and Joe Biden all wanted us to roll the dice.

What we're left with, then, is a situation where we have a few contrarians and outcasts who got things right and the mainstreamers who got things wrong. In both finance and politics, we're in a spot where the old-guard has been wiped out, and the new guard hasn't yet gained the trust needed to take long-term, contrarian positions. Obama fills that void because he's made a lot of good decisions (mostly in his campaign) and he's not part of the old guard. That is why, I think, we already have so much faith in him. He's the only figure who is neither old guard nor an outcast. With these kinds of leaders so scarce, he's a valuable commodity.