Co-President Obama
The Time America Might Have Had “Co-Presidents”
Almost no one remembers now, but shortly before the Republican convention in 1980 there was a brief stir over the prospect of “co-presidents.”
Ronald Reagan had sewn up the nomination to run against the incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter. The chatter was that Reagan would choose former President Gerald Ford as his running mate.
It made sense electorally. Reagan had given Ford a run for the money in the 1976 primaries. Reagan represented a new kind of conservative insurgency; Ford represented the old East Coast GOP establishment. So it would be the ultimate “unity ticket.”
And given Ford’s previous experience in the Oval Office, the media naturally kicked around the possibility of “co-presidents.” The narrative was that Ford would be there to steady the hand of the loose-cannon Reagan.
Obviously nothing came of it; the East Coast GOP establishment got its spot on the ticket with George H.W. Bush instead.
Hold that thought as we fast-forward 44 years…
We won’t belabor anything you can read elsewhere. But we will reiterate what we said three weeks ago today: Never mind a second term. Is Joe Biden sufficiently compos mentis to occupy the Oval Office for six more months?
Along those lines, House Speaker Mike Johnson is now calling on Biden to resign. But that’s nothing other than the usual D.C. kabuki theater.
If Johnson were serious, he would launch impeachment proceedings against Vice President Harris and every member of the cabinet for concealing the extent of Biden’s infirmities, no?
For all that’s happened since the debate debacle of June 27, “We’re in for at least another month of political chaos, maybe more. Put your crash helmets on,” says Paradigm macroeconomics maven Jim Rickards.
We must once again give credit where it’s due: Jim anticipated Biden’s early departure last fall — in the October edition of Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence, published Sept. 29, 2023…
… the Democrats can’t wait to get rid of Biden. They’re preparing to tell him he has to step down or at least announce he’s not running… DNC rules may have to be heavily revised since it is likely that Biden will control a large share of the delegates if this substitution process occurs late in the primary season… At the end of an ugly process, the Democrats will have what they believe is a viable candidate to face off against the Republican nominee.
More recently, Jim said in this space 10 days ago that it would be the Democrats’ donor class that ultimately determined Biden’s fate — and those donors were snapping their checkbooks shut. Sure enough, The New York Times subsequently reported that some $90 million in donations were “on hold.”
Kamala Harris, Bob Dole and Barack Obama
The corporate media’s coronation notwithstanding, it is not yet a certainty that Vice President Harris will be the Democrats’ nominee.
To be sure, the Clintons are publicly backing her. So is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, heretofore the name mentioned most often after Harris’ as a Biden replacement.
That would suggest the Democrats are still writing off 2024.
If, as one Dem insider said three weeks ago, “2024 is likely beyond recovery”... and if Harris’ approval rating is little better or even worse than Biden’s… then it’s only logical to put her at the top of the ticket and justify it by saying “it’s her turn, she’s earned it, yada yada.”
Sending her to ignominious defeat in 2024 would have the considerable upside of taking her out of the running for 2028; the best analogue that comes to mind is the Republicans running Bob Dole in 1996.
History rhyming?
But hold on: Nancy Pelosi has yet to endorse Harris. Ditto for Barack Obama. [Just in: Pelosi has endorsed too. Life comes at you fast.]
Obama says only that he has "extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges."
Hmmm… “Delegates are not bound to vote for any particular candidate at this stage,” Jim Rickards reminds us. “There are more than 4,600 delegates. They are not pledged.”
That said, on a conference call with his Rickards Uncensored readers on Friday, Jim broached the possibility — and it is only a possibility, to be sure — that Barack Obama would be Harris’ running mate.
Makes sense in a certain way, right? Reassure fence-sitting voters that a steady hand would be around at all times?
It’s the co-president thing again — even if the media probably wouldn’t spin it that way this time.
But wait, you say: Obama’s already been president for two terms. He can’t do that, can he?
To borrow his 2008 campaign slogan, yes he can.
More from Jim Rickards: “The controlling law in this case is the 22nd Amendment. It says, ‘No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice…’ Obama has been elected twice so he cannot be elected president again. He could be elected vice president on a ticket with President Kamala Harris.
“Thereafter, if Kamala Harris resigned, Obama would become president again. This does not violate the 22nd Amendment because his third time as president is not the result of being ‘elected to the office.’”
We’ll leave it there today — except to once more give Jim credit for an exceptional forecast nearly 10 months ahead of time.
CrowdStrike: Where Are the Handcuffs?
Air travel still isn’t back to normal more than 72 hours after the CrowdStrike fiasco — and CRWD shares are down another 13% as we write.
Alas, a collapse in the cybersecurity company’s share price is the closest we’ll get to anything resembling “justice.”
Over the weekend, Microsoft said, "We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices." That puts it in the running for the worst IT meltdown in history. As one wag put it, we got Y2K a quarter-century late.
Saturday’s Wall Street Journal tried to put the blame on Microsoft for “decades-old design choices that allowed the actions of a little-known software company to disable millions of Windows machines.”
Well, yes, but the immediate error was that of CrowdStrike — yet another example of the “crisis of competence” afflicting everything from Boeing jetliners to the Secret Service.
Meanwhile, China emerged nearly all but unscathed from this electronic train wreck: “CrowdStrike is hardly used there,” reports the BBC. “Very few organizations will buy software from an American firm that, in the past, has been vocal about the cybersecurity threat posed by Beijing.”
By the way, CrowdStrike was instrumental to the narrative that “the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails” in 2016.
The FBI never bothered conducting a forensic inspection of the DNC’s computers. It handed that job to CrowdStrike — whose president Shawn Henry happened to be ex-FBI — even though CrowdStrike was working for the Clinton campaign.
In 2017, Henry testified behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee. Under oath he conceded there was no smoking-gun evidence the emails were hacked: “We did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated [moved electronically] from the DNC.”
In other words, the emails were likely leaked and not hacked. But the “Russia hacked the DNC” narrative persists to this day — in large part because Henry’s testimony was not made public until the spring of 2020.
Apart from CrowdStrike, the rest of the U.S. stock market is on the rally tracks — with the S&P 500 up more than three quarters of a percent to 5,549. The Nasdaq is up even stronger.
“Big Tech and semiconductors — two of last week’s big losers — are leading us higher so far,” says Paradigm chart hound Greg Guenthner — not that he’s ready to pronounce this a relief rally after last week’s sell-off. “No need to rush out and buy every dip.”
Crude has barely budged from the $80 mark despite the Middle East war metastasizing — Israel now directly at war with Yemen’s Houthi faction.
Precious metals are losing further ground after another vicious Friday slam. Gold has slipped below $2,400 and silver is only pennies away from breaking below $29.
No major economic numbers to speak of today, but we’ll get a boatload later this week starting Wednesday with the “flash PMI” snapshot of the economy’s performance during July.
Gold: Not Just for the Gray-Haired Anymore
We now have numbers to back up something we started noticing two years ago: Young people are gravitating to gold.
“Among wealthy investors under the age of 43, 45% own gold as a physical asset, and another 45% are interested in holding it,” says a Reuters story citing a recent study from Bank of America Private Bank. “Those are far higher percentages than other age groups.”
Another study by the giant asset manager State Street finds millennials have a 17% gold allocation to their portfolios — compared with 10% for Xers and boomers.
Undoubtedly the interest in gold coincides with the fact it’s trading near an all-time high.
But this trend has been taking shape for a while. The numbers jibe with what Paradigm’s metals-and-energy authority Byron King discovered at a conference in 2022 focused on natural resources investing.
Typically the audience at these affairs is dominated by older folks. But on this occasion, young people who made a pile during the 2020–21 crypto rally were rotating into gold. “I made serious money in crypto,” said one fellow. “Now I have to find a way to hang onto it.”
Gold as a wealth preserver: As the Reuters newswire sums up, financial advisers are noticing that as younger people accumulate wealth, “investment goals often shift from growth to capital preservation.”
Thus California-based financial planner Eric Amzalag says, “I have found with my millennial clients that as they get wealthier, they are more interested in investing in directly held, self-custodied gold.”
No fooling around with ETFs there, apparently…
Mailbag: CrowdStrike Hits Home, Subject Lines (Again)
We got a firsthand account of the CrowdStrike screwup’s impact…
“I’m a paramedic in Louisville, Kentucky (just did not get enough shootings in Baltimore County is my joke why I moved here. Actually better pay, less cost and the wife is from here).
“Friday the hospital patient charting and records management programs went down. This caused massive delays in receiving new patients and tracking what they got for treatment and billing.
“We had hospitals with nine-hour-plus wait averages for non-life-threatened patients. Most were telling people two–four hours.
“The trauma center had to manually override the Pyxis medication distribution system because critical patients were not getting registered quickly.
“Unlike the ‘old days’ last century (1990s) charting is much more complete. My old reports used to take a page and a half on the most intense patients. Now it’s three pages just for foot pain. So much that is now required is for billing.
“After the system got ‘fixed’ wait times dropped back down to the more normal 30–45-minute waits.”
Once more, we’re getting an earful about the recent change we made to the subject line in these daily dispatches…
“After holding my tongue while evaluating the new headline without the ‘5 Bullets’...
“However, now that I've seen it for a few weeks, it's definitely not better than before. Results? Now I've deleted several issues because they looked like all the other stuff that fills my inbox.
“Add ‘5 Bullets’ to your subject line!”
“How can people be so upset about not labeling it 5 Bullets,” writes our final correspondent, “when I still remember it as the 5 Min. Forecast?
“I think everyone, you included, are overthinking this. Other than that, keep up the great content and thanks.”
Dave responds: I know I mentioned this topic will be discussed at a meeting on Wednesday. I assure you that’s not the only thing on the agenda!
