Welcome to the day after the day after.

For two years we have put up with ever increasing “sturm und drang,” to the point where, for the past few weeks, real news simply could not be heard, much less understood.

Yes, I know, there will of course be victory laps for one side. And the other is already setting up “what went wrong” conferences. Driving home yesterday, I even saw a “Palin in 2012” bumper sticker.

But for now at least, if we are very, very lucky, the noise of the U.S. electoral cycle will diminish just low enough and just long enough so that we can hear ourselves think for a moment.

The Past Looks Mighty Ugly…

So let’s use this short interlude to ponder the facts on the ground: The U.S. economy is about as weak as has been seen in recent memory.

Cut it any way you like and the story is just plain awful: factory orders in September and October were dismal. Pry away a few airplane orders and you get some of the steepest month-over-month declines since the Department of Commerce began to bother with such studies.

On the service side of things, the Institute for Supply Management is reporting that its sector index fell from 50.2 in September to 44.4 in October. (50 being this index’s recessionary “line in the sand.”)

And finally, consumer spending has fallen for five consecutive months, yielding the worst performance in 28 years. MasterCard’s SpendingPulse unit advises us that U.S. consumers slashed spending in October, shunning purchases of $1,000-plus items in particular.

And The Immediate Future Looks Uglier…

Now, there’s a good chance that you already knew one or two of these facts. Lord only knows you have heard me rant for ages as to how the economy was headed this way. I would suspect, in fact, that you are as tired of hearing it as I am of saying it.

However, now that the election is out of the way, we are all finally on the same page: It’s been a recession, it still is a recession, and it will continue to be one for at least one or two more quarters. Maybe even three quarters if we really screw up.

But the stock market is at its heart a hopeful beast. And if even a bear like myself is getting tired of all this negativity, than perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Exhausting the Bear

I must say that I enjoyed seeing shares of ExxonMobil (XOM: NYSE) sell for 2005 prices over the past few weeks. The arguments for XOM’s demise reflected blind fervid bearish sentiment as perfectly one could hope to see.

XOM couldn’t possibly make a profit with oil at $70/barrel, we heard. $90 was “even worse.” $140 was simply suicidal!

Except that the world’s biggest profit machine did make record-breaking profits at each of those levels. Now oil appears to be rising again, as the Saudis succeed at choking back outflows a tad. And I’ll just bet you that XOM will report again next quarter – and yet again the quarter after that – that it continues to make a damned fine profit.

What’s more, I suspect XOM may not be alone. Blind bearishness can distract us from obvious deals, just as blind bullishness can blind us to dangerous threats.

Keep It Balanced

I’m not suggesting that folks abandon put option contracts just yet. After all, even in ordinary times, there are all sorts of schemes Washington can invent to screw up a recovery. And Washington’s current extreme level of participation in the market gives it inordinate leverage – for good or ill – this time around.

Add in the fact that two of the three guys running the trillion-dollar recovery project are for all practical purposes the lamest of lame ducks, and one could easily visualize that fund becoming a veritable cornucopia for “Friends of George, Dick, Hank and Ben.”

Just to be fair, if there is anything left come January 20, it might very well be used to decorate a few Democratic cribs too. (After all, a trillion dollars could lead even a saint astray, let alone a newly-anointed president.)

Yes, the facts on the ground are damned ugly, and likely to get uglier before they get better. But they are temporal as well. Eventually they will change (they always do), and the stock market will anticipate this change (as it always does) by as much as a year.

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