If Presidential Candidates Were Stocks

You may have missed this late Friday column from Dan Gross at Slate:

• Barack Obama is the alternative-energy sector. Hybrid, next-generation upstart, unafraid of entrenched market leaders, and embraced by corn-growing Iowans, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and East Coast moneymen.

• Mike Huckabee is Chick-fil-A. Cheaper, healthier Southern alternative to steak and prime rib dished up by urban rivals. Explicitly fuses religion into business strategy in a way that no competitor does.

• Hillary Clinton is Citigroup (C). New York-based, enormously well-capitalized, longstanding market leader whose name is synonymous with the sector it dominates. A powerhouse in the 1990s is having difficulty reclaiming past glory.

• Mitt Romney is the Blackstone Group (BX). Insecure private-equity player that tries to wow the masses with ostentatious displays of wealth—kitted out Mitt-Mobile for Romney, $3 million birthday party for Blackstone head honcho Steve Schwartzman.

• John Edwards is McDonald's (MCD). Disdained by the media elite as déclassé, shunned by the fashionable as too populist and unhealthy to body politic, manages to thrive by working hard and dishing out cheap meat and potatoes to working-class patrons.

• Rudy Giuliani is Bear Stearns (BSC). New York-based firm spent years since 2001 raising easy money and globe-trotting. Initials of both should be B.S. Questions raised about judgment and adolescent personal behavior of standard-bearer—alleged dope-smoking for Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne, sex on the city for Giuliani.

• John McCain is General Motors (GM). Old warhorse with solid reputation as patriotic brand takes repeated kicks but refuses to give in. Buoyed by poor performance of two top domestic rivals and by positive developments overseas—Iraq for McCain, growth abroad for GM.

Fun stuff. Reminds me of 2006's "If Banks Were Musicians . . . "

Source:
If Presidential Candidates Were Stocks
Daniel Gross
Slate, Friday, Jan. 4, 2008, at 5:55 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2181357

Comments

[mag55443:]

Who is Thompson? Some mild mannerd guy, under the radar, with solutions to problems. Maybe some small biotech with an answer to some major problem.

2008 Jan 08 10:42 AM

[dbbennett:]

And Ron Paul?

A small-cap ready-to-explode contrarian junior gold miner stock with no analysts to report on it?

2008 Jan 08 02:26 PM

[WAKEUP:]

Would you buy a used car, from ANY of them?

2008 Jan 10 11:39 AM

[Reinko:]

This is funny because I am arguing for a lot of years already the the US military should get a Nasdaq stock listing so the 'going for oil' thing in Iraq finally made some sense...

Why not? They are technically highly advanced (just look at their air wing), they are highly innovative (Dubya visit to Israel is guided by just 40 thousand of high explosives via air power today, thus relating politics and killing effeciently) and most of all: They are the Power and the Glory.

Now this is better than gold, gold is just a stupid metal that is not highly innovative and in the future there are lots of other nations that need to be freed and, just by the way, have some commodities.

All these idiots that say it should not be Nasdaq listed, well they are just so pre 9/11.

2008 Jan 10 06:41 PM

[Reinko:]

Correction:

The phrase (Dubya visit to Israel is guided by just 40 thousand of high explosives via air power today, thus relating politics and killing effeciently)

Is replaced by:

(Dubya visit to Israel is guided by just 40 thousand pounds of high explosives via air power today, thus relating politics and killing effeciently)

In this regard a pound is about 450 grams so we have about 18 thousand of kilo's of high explosives while there was no monitoring of the thing known as 'collateral damage' on the 43 targets of today...

2008 Jan 10 06:46 PM