That’s not to say that Barack Obama’s electoral chances actually caused the market slump we’re seeing, it’s just the possibility that his chances are making it worse. I don’t know enough about the markets to pass judgment here, but Charles Gasparino makes an interesting case.

Most investors know the devil is in the details – and the details of Obama’s economic plans are anything but reassuring…

And, as it looks increasingly likely that Obama will be that man, the markets are casting a vote of “no confidence.”…

Recently, Obama said he wants to expedite loans to small businesses, so he seems to have a clue that they produce much of the country’s job growth. Yet his income-tax hike on upper brackets will hit vast numbers of small businesses – they’d face the highest rates they’ve seen in decades.

Overall, his plan includes some of the most lethal tax increases imaginable, including a jump in the capital-gains rate. He’d expand government spending massively, with everything from new public-works projects to increases in foreign aid to a surge in Afghanistan – plus hand out a token $500 welfare check that he calls a tax cut to everyone else.

This is clearly the wrong way to go in the wake of an economic meltdown – yet Obama, for all his talk of how willing he is to compromise, of how he’d bring people together, is sticking to his tax guns.

I know at least one top Wall Street executive, an Obama supporter from the start of his campaign, who has recently urged Obama to rethink his tax plan – and that was before last week’s record losses on the Dow.

But if Obama is rethinking, he’s not saying. As his running mate, Joe Biden tells us that it’s patriotic to pay higher taxes, Obama remains committed to squeezing businesses even if the recession grows.

Some reckon that a President Obama won’t go through with his plans. They look at his (thin) record and see a wimp who’s never taken a firm stand on much of anything, much less enacting tax hikes during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

I look at Obama’s record differently. From his days as a community activist, to his years in the Illinois Senate and now his brief time in the US Senate, he has shown little inclination to deviate from his party’s tax-and-spend orthodoxy.

And if he governs like a liberal ideologue – with a belief that the government that works best is the one that’s biggest and raises taxes the most – he won’t even have to work hard to get his way. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t stop him – the Democratic majorities in Congress are only likely to grow.

And the markets know this – even if pundits (even many of the financial ones) refuse to face it.

Again, I don’t know enough about the markets to pass judgment on this, but it’s a compelling case.