“After the Plunge, a Chance to Buy” was the headline atop our front page on February 28, the day after what our Dan Dorfman called a “bloodbath” on Wall Street. A subheadline noted “Some See Stocks Underpriced in Wake of Market Decline.” The headline was read on the Fox News Channel, and its optimism turned out to be right. In the event the stock market recovered and, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, is up about 6% since the close on February 27, even after yesterday’s decline of 2.33% in the S&P 500.

The question is whether this time around, the market recovery will be as robust. There’s a strong case to be made that it will be — President Bush’s tax cuts have unleashed economic growth, and the Federal Reserve has held the line against inflation. Yet there are plenty of warning signs on the horizon. For starters, there’s a move afoot in the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee to raise taxes on hedge funds and private equity managers, a sign of a bitter backlash against the rich that has the potential to expand into a broader push to raise taxes, with the effect of slowing or reversing economic growth.

The situation could worsen if a Democrat is elected president. On the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average took its second-biggest plunge of the year, the statement issued by the leading Democratic presidential contender, Senator Clinton, was one complaining that an American company had been too profitable. “Exxon Mobil has yet again posted quarterly profits of more than $10 billion,” she said, adding, “American consumers continue to struggle to pay higher energy costs because the oil companies have refused to invest in refinery capacity or alternative energy sources. Instead of lining the pockets of big oil, we need a new direction in energy policy.”

Mrs. Clinton didn’t acknowledge that the Exxon Mobil second-quarter profit was down from what it had earned in the second quarter of the year before, though the markets did, sending Exxon Mobil’s stock price down 4.91% on the day, a steeper decline than the broader indexes. The Associated Press noted that the quarterly results were lower than what analysts expected, and quoted one analyst, Brian Youngberg, as characterizing the results as “disappointing.” So much for pocket-lining. It’s enough to make a person — and not just a stock market investor — see what Governor Romney means in describing Mrs. Clinton’s approach as “out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx.” What’s good for markets is politicians who welcome surging corporate profits, not politicians who issue press releases bemoaning them. While plenty of factors move markets, it’s not too much to predict that one of those factors will be discounting of the decisions the millions of minds that are comprised by a market expect to be made by voters in next year and a half.