The market’s verdict on the $700 billion bailout was pretty clear: Stock prices started dropping the moment the bill was passed on Friday afternoon and continued to do so Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing down 370 points for the day – after being down 800 points earlier that same day.

The economic effect is also pretty clear: Given that the bailout plan is being launched at a point when money is already tight – and that it pours $700 billion of our money into the most useless, toxic waste left over from the housing bubble – you can be certain that it will end up starving more-worthwhile potential investments of badly needed capital.

But the political impact is less clear, in both the short- and long-term periods.

For a start, it’s not clear to the electorate who is to blame for the financial debacle. The Democrat presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., naturally blames the Bush administration and mysterious “deregulation” for the problem. Indeed, he has a particular deregulatory act in mind, the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which ended the separation of commercial and investment banking – conveniently ex-Sen. Phil Gramm was an advisor to Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Add in conventional Democratic rhetoric about the “evils” of Wall Street (albeit toned down somewhat since so many Wall Street titans are Democratic supporters and have provided funding for Obama’s campaign) and you would think he had a pretty clear path to sail to achieve electoral victory. After all, if economic or political disaster occurs on the “other guy’s watch, it generally doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out a way to blame that “other guy” for what happened.

However, it’s not quite as simple as that, though you would think it was from the initial reactions of the McCain campaign. Blaming Wall Street greed gets Republicans nowhere, since Wall Streeters are popularly thought to be mostly Republican. And if there was regulating to be done, why didn’t the Republican administration do it? Thus, the populist comments by the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, at the end of the vice-presidential debate last Thursday night amounted to a series of “own goals”— a soccer term for when a team forgets which end is which and boots the ball past its own goalkeeper.

There are two perfectly respectable things a Republican candidate can say in defense of the last eight years of economic management:

• First, much of the housing disaster was caused by the activities of Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), the two government-backed behemoths who should never have existed in a rational free-market economic system – and who were pushed into conservatorship by foreign governments [To read all about that, check out Money Morning’s special investigative report on how foreign bondholders pressured the federal government to make that move.]
• Second, much of the misbehavior on Wall Street – as well as the subsequent collapse – resulted from an excessively loose monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve over a period of more than a decade – and the Fed, in case nobody noticed, is not a private-sector operation.

There were signs Monday that McCain was moving onto the attack on the subject of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama, after all, was the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign funds provided by the executives of those organizations – topped only by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., who chairs the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees Fannie and Freddie. Further, McCain was a leader of the (rather feeble) Republican attempts in 2005 to rein them in, which Obama and other Democrats opposed. Indeed, back in 2004-2005, there are lots of good sound-bite quotes from the Democrats about what splendid organizations Fannie and Freddie were.

Regrettably, for the Republicans, the responsibility of Fannie and Freddie for the disasters on Wall Street, while substantial (the securitization market would probably not have got off the ground without them) is somewhat indirect. Even more directly linked is the responsibility of the Fed in inflating money supply and inflating bubble after bubble. No politician, except the eccentric Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., has gone after the Fed, and since neither McCain nor Palin can be classed as economic experts, it seems very unlikely that either of them will use the Fed’s misdeeds as a key election-talking point in the last month of the campaign.

Thus, Obama’s mantra of Wall Street greed and excessive deregulation will probably continue to register with voters in the next few weeks, and should maintain – or even increase – the lead Obama is showing in opinion polls. The $700 billion bailout, which appears (rightly) to be massively unpopular, will remain in the news as supervising staffers are appointed and the first purchases of loans are made, and will be blamed primarily on the administration that thought of it. Both candidates supported it, so any advantage between them will be minor. At this point, therefore, it is difficult to see how McCain can win on Nov. 4, unless some foreign policy crisis refocuses the electorate’s attention away from the economy.

Obama elected on a platform similar to President Bill Clinton’s 1992 platform of free trade and middle class tax cuts would be relatively investor-friendly, as was Clinton himself. Moreover, Obama’s undoubted ability might help him take the right steps to clear up the current mess and move the economy back into growth mode. But Obama elected on a platform of bashing Wall Street, opposing global trade, raising taxes on the rich and re-regulating everything is a very different matter; if he really believed his own propaganda he would be a menace both to investors and the U.S. economy.

Fortunately, as with most politicians, it seems likely that what Obama says to get elected and what he will do in office bear little relation to each other. We will just have to wait and hope.

[Editor’s Note: Money Morning Contributing Editor Martin Hutchinson has personally interviewed the economic advisors for candidates McCain, Obama and Edwards, and very early on concluded that Obama and McCain would be the best candidates for investors. For a full report on the "presidential profit plays," please click here. The report is free of charge.]

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