Obama’s Not-So-Hot Date With Wall Street

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Jul 1, 2011
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All is not well and good in the land of Obama...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/obamas-not-so-hot-date-with-wall-street.html?pagewanted=all

By the end of January 2008, Obama had raised well over $7 million from the securities and investment industry. By the end of January this year, he had only $2.4 million to show.

A top priority was figuring out how to rope in major Wall Street donors who supported Obama in 2008 but weren’t committed to big fund-raising roles in 2012 — people like Hamilton E. James, the billionaire president and chief operating officer of the private-equity firm Blackstone; and Eric Mindich, a former Goldman Sachs whiz kid who went on to start his own hedge fund. Mitt Romney’s campaign had already poached the investor Peter W. May and the hedge-fund titan Paul Tudor Jones, who in 2007 held a 500-person Greenwich, Conn., fund-raiser for Obama with George Soros. The Obama team wanted to avoid more high-profile defections.

“They’re ‘waiting for clarity’ — that’s the term they use. Or they say the administration ‘hasn’t led sufficiently’ on an issue

Some bankers believed that the administration’s strategy was to talk tough in public and play damage control in private, and they were sick of playing along.

For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.

“This administration has a more contemptuous view of big money and of Wall Street than any administration in 40 years,” the donor said. “And it shows.”

But four years, one recession and a host of battles — over financial regulation and the nomination of Elizabeth Warren, over Dodd-Frank and the Buffett Rule — have taken their toll. Some on Wall Street are apoplectic. One former supporter, Dan Loeb, compared Obama to Nero; the president’s enemies insinuated worse. In 2010, Stephen A. Schwarzman, a founder of Blackstone, said that an Obama proposal to raise taxes on “carried interest” — the main source of income for most private-equity managers — reminded him of “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Even as Obama outpaced Romney in traditional fund-raising, Restore Our Future, exploiting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and subsequent rulings and regulations, was bringing in millions of dollars in unlimited checks from hedge-fund and private-equity magnates.

By the end of February, the group had raised more than $43 million, almost half of it from Wall Street — more money than Obama raised from the industry during the entire 2008 campaign. Paul Tudor Jones was among the group’s donors, cutting Restore Our Future a $200,000 check in December. At the same time, a super PAC founded by former Obama aides, Priorities USA Action, was struggling, raising less than $5 million, much of it from Hollywood and unions. The Democratic group faced a particularly cold reception among Wall Street Democrats, some of whom feared any money they gave would be used to finance attacks on their own industry.
 
So I guess the Wall Street Is Obama's biggest donor meme is over. Fuck-em, better off without their dirty strings attached money.
 

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