Buried deep in the financial section of the Wall Street Journal the other day was a dispatch reporting speculation about the effect on the stock market of a victory by the Democrat from Massachusetts who is running for president, Senator Kerry. The Journal quoted a senior portfolio manager at Federated Investors in New York, Uri Landesman, as predicting that, as the Journal paraphrased it, “expectations of a Kerry victory could knock U.S. stocks down 10% to 15%.”In the event of a Kerry administration, Mr. Landesman advised, “sell all your health care” stocks.

Our own columnist, Dan Dorfman, got ahead of this story when he reported on February 25 that Fred Dickson, chief investment strategist of regional brokerage D.A. Davidson & Co. of Great Falls, Mont., declared, “the market is already reacting negatively to a possible Kerry win.” Mr. Dickson, a former Goldman Sachs strategist, told Mr. Dorfman last month that if the election were held today and Mr. Kerry won, the Dow would plunge 300 or 400 points the following day and shortly thereafter would fall below 10,000.

No wonder that among Mr. Bush’s biggest fund-raisers are the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Henry M. Paulson Jr.; the co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Henry Kravis; the chairman and CEO of Bear Stearns, James Cayne; the CEO of Merrill Lynch, Stanley O’Neal; the CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston, John Mack; the CEO of Morgan Stanley, Philip Purcell, and the CEO of the Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman. These Wall Street titans know that Mr. Bush would be better than Mr. Kerry for their bottom lines and their wallets.

And it’s not just the big fish whose portfolios and profits would be adversely affected by a Kerry victory. A report issued earlier this month by the American Shareholders Association notes that today, nearly 52% of American households own stock, either directly or through mutual funds. In 1989, according to the report, 28% of a family’s financial assets were stocks and mutual funds. Today, 56% of the typical family’s assets are in stocks and mutual funds.

So there are a lot of people who would be affected if Mr. Kerry rolled back the Bush tax cuts and tried to nationalize health care and if the stock market sank as a result. The American Shareholders Association’s report, titled “John Kerry’s Record on Investors: 19 Years of Opposing Investors,” notes that Mr. Kerry “has voted against capital gains tax reduction every time it has been voted in the Senate — 15 times.”

The Massachusetts Democrat has tried to ease the fears of ordinary Americans by insisting, as he did again yesterday, that “98% of Americans” would get a tax cut in a Kerry administration. That may be so — though we don’t believe Mr. Kerry will follow through with his promise of a tax cut any more than Bill Clinton did on his 1992 campaign promise of a middle-class tax cut. Yet for many, even an income tax cut will be a pale palliative if the Kerry tax increase on the wealthiest 2% of Americans sends the stock market into a downward spiral that leaves the rest of the country’s shareholders with less money in their retirement accounts. The ranks of those who would end up poorer because of a Kerry administration would then extend far beyond the top 2%. Now, one can point out that the stock market didn’t exactly tank the last time we had a Democratic president, and that Mr. Kerry would likely bring back a lot of the Clinton financial team under which the American economy and Wall Street prospered in the late 1990s. But the stock market didn’t really start soaring full-bore until the Republican Party, led by Newt Gingrich, took over Congress in 1994.

One can also point out that the president of the American Shareholders Association, Grover Norquist, is a well-known Bush supporter.

But at a certain point, Mr. Kerry and his defenders are going to have to stop making excuses and face the fact that a lot of money managers, both professional and amateur, worry that his plans to raise taxes and expand the government’s role in health care would destroy a historic amount of value for millions of American investors.