Predictions--for 2008 [updated][updated again]

Popular journalism is all about moving on relentlessly to the next hot topic, but a little historical perspective can be marvelously sobering. Because I don’t systematically read my magazines, there’s always an issue lying about from several months ago, and it’s a treat to look at them knowing how things like the Democratic primaries or the Dow Jones averages turned out.

On January 7 a year ago New York magazine’s John Heilemann described Hillary Clinton’s massive misfire in preparing for the Iowa caucuses, how she dissed the local political clubs with no-shows while positioning herself as the inevitable candidate surrounded by presidential trappings, blaring trumpets, seraphin and cherubim. It’s a remarkable article because pretty much the entire primary season is laid out there, her hubris, her clueless campaign operation, the frantic last-minute smears dished out to try to push Obama into a ditch (remember the ‘secular madrassa’ he attended? not a Sarah Palin invention but straight from Hillaryoid Bob Kerrey), and last but not least the fatal influence of Bill, to whose wagon Hillary chose to remain hitched both in life and in the art of politics.

Heilemann speculated that even if Hillary were to win, she had exposed her weakness: the impression that she was a ‘candidate without a core or convictions other than that she should be, must be, president’ and that all the folderol built up around her was engineered to conceal that fact.

By contrast, the ten predictions for 2008 laid out by business writer James J. Cramer in the same issue would be embarrassing if anyone were rude enough to remember them. He acknowledges that making money in stocks may be ‘tough sledding’ over the next 12 months and then boldly insists that Goldman Sachs would finish the year at $300 a share—‘not a prediction, an inevitability’. LOL, ROTFL, off by a mere $226. Similar Fantasyland expectations are laid out for Google, Verizon and Apple.

Cramer’s crystal ball on corporate mergers was a little cloudy too, pretty much a .000 batting average except for a half-point he gets for guessing the acquisition of Merrill Lynch—by Europeans, he said, not as it turned out, by Bank of America. (The Europeans were too smart.) He foresaw that a simple interest rate cut would spur the sagging stock market back into the heavens—not!

Okay, it’s easy to make fun of stock pickers getting it wrong but useful to recall when these ‘experts’ insist on ridiculous fees to manage our pension funds. However, one prediction I would have liked to see come true is Cramer’s vision of an Army of the Foreclosed marching on the White House and camping out on the grounds of the Washington Monument. So far the only army in that town has been Barack’s.

Twilight Highlights: Speaking of politicians with no core convictions, I wonder how long our new senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, will take to distance herself from one of her lobbyist father’s clients: Altria, the tobacco peddler formerly known as Philip Morris. About as long as the rest of the Democratic establishment will take to put mileage between themselves and Governor Paterson, currently buried up to the neck in his own slop.

[P.S.] I forgot to include the fact that Altria executives and its PAC provided Ms. Gillibrand’s 2008 campaign with the tidy sum of $24,200, according to the Jan 25 New York Daily News. Remind me a year from now when the local Democrats insist on voting for her to avoid corporate-toady-sell-out Republicans from gaining her office.

[Update] David Paterson is a prick, but he’s an amateur prick, the worst kind. The New York Post all but outed their source for the hatchet toss aimed at Caroline Kennedy after she bowed out, previously identified by reportorial convention as ‘someone close to the governor’. Paterson denied he knew who did it, but The Post responded with a picture of Paterson with Pinocchio nose on its main web page, and a columnist called him out directly.

Meanwhile, New York magazine reports this week that Paterson commonly uses that phrase when he talks off the record himself. Jesus, God and all the saints. Could DP possibly have heaved that parting burst of mojoncitos from his own sling?! The guy diddles around for a month, goes along with the farce of a total neophyte cashing in on her name for national office and suddenly pirouettes and pretends he never took her seriously. Not satisfied with the hash he made of the whole process, he then stoops to spreading dirt on her personal life? The political knives are about to be drawn on this clown and none too soon.