It's Obama's bear market now

It's now officially President Obama's bear market.

My RedState colleague, Francis Cianfrocca called it:

With yesterday’s declines, we now have an "official" Obama bear market, defined as a 20% decline. The S&P 500 index closed at 850 on the last trading day before Obama’s inauguration, and now it’s at 682.

Reaching an official bear market in a mere six weeks is record setting:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen faster under President Obama than under any new president in at least 90 years.

• The Dow has also dropped 31 percent since Election Day.

• Obama is at risk of breaking a historical trend -- in which the Dow soars an average of close to 10 percent in the first year after a Democrat wins the presidency.

The stock market is so bad that even the Obamamania infected legacy media has wonders whether Obama is hurting the market:

• ABC World News' Charlie Gibson said, "No matter what the Administration seems to be doing with the economy, the market does not seem to like it."

• The Washington Post reports President Obama "cautioned against paying too much attention to markets and even said 'buying stocks is a potentially good deal,'" but "investor confidence has been sapped by signs that the US economy remains exceptionally weak 15 months after the start of the recession."

• The Associated Press reports, "The war between Republicans and Democrats to frame the blame for the economy erupted in earnest this week." Republicans "pushed back against...Obama's claim -- echoed relentlessly by his Cabinet members and Democrats in Congress -- that he didn't cause the mess and shouldn't be judged yet on obligating taxpayers for a trillion dollars trying to fix it."

Note what Cianfrocca wrote:

Don’t let ANYONE tell you that this is Bush's fault, or that Obama inherited the decline. The stock market by definition is a leading indicator. It predicts the future for corporate earnings, not the present or the past.

The stock market is saying that with Obama in office, the outlook for business is poor. And with his promises of higher taxes and more regulation, Obama is doing his very considerable best to reinforce the negative perception.

My fellow Examiner, Scott Martin, calls Obama to task for comparing the stock market to a political a tracking poll:

It bobs up and down every day... If you spend your time worrying about that, you're probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong....

Obama got it wrong the market isn't bobbing up and down -- its in a record setting bear market.