Obama imagines that political stratagems have no real-world consequences. On Afghanistan he threw a bone to the Left by imposing a deadline on the withdrawal of troops, not quite appreciating the unnerving effect it would have on allies and the resulting muddling of his policy message. On the economy in December Obama went to the Brookings Institute to say he understood that the private sector is where the jobs are. But now he is on a populist binge and that too has real-world consequences:

Wall Street tumbled for a third day on Friday as a three-day slide pushed the markets down almost 5 percent. For the Dow, Friday was the lowest close since early November. For a second day, shares declined on concerns about President Obama’s proposal for tighter restrictions on the activity of banks as the markets finished the week with a three-day losing streak. . .

Quincy M. Krosby, a markets strategist at Prudential Financial, said investors were also weighing news that Ben S. Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve faced growing opposition.
“What they’re sensing is this has taken on a political visceral momentum,” Ms. Krosby said. “They makes them hesitant about the future of the banking system.”

Pundits debate whether Obama’s new populist red meat will “work” — that is, allow him to recover his political footing. But if he unnerves the markets and spooks investors, he’ll be in further trouble. After all, he might insist that the economy is all George W. Bush’s fault, but fewer and fewer voters are buying that. And if his own policies — spending with abandon, pursuing a junk-a-thon stimulus plan, spending a year on the job-killing ObamaCare and cap-and-trade, and now frightening the financial markets — have paralyzed employers, then he surely is accountable for those results.

Even within the political realm, his populist jag is costly and self-defeating. Playing to the firebrand anti-business crowd has arguably inflamed opposition to his own Fed nominee and put Bernanke’s reappointment at risk. The “populist brushfire that has burned through Democratic fortunes this week [which] threatened Friday to claim Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke” has been fanned by none other than Obama himself.

That too will reflect on Obama, for it is his nominee after all. The resulting uncertainty that would follow Bernanke’s rejection will likely beget a new round of handwringing from investors.

This, of course, is what happens when everything is a matter of politics. At some point you have to get the policy right. Having failed to do that, Obama is only making things worse with yet another political gambit. He — and the country — will suffer the consequences.