Wall Street Bails Out on Obama

Townhall.com ^ | July 9, 2010 | Donald Lambro

[Kaslin]

WASHINGTON -- After a year of being pilloried and persecuted in Congress, many of Wall Street's donors have ended their rocky, odd-couple relationship with the Democrats and closed their checkbooks.

The news that a growing number of Wall Street fat cats are no longer giving money to the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees is the latest in a lengthening saga of bad news for the Democrats who face what could be catastrophic losses in the midterm elections.

Since the 2008 election, Wall Street tycoons who helped elect Barack Obama and bankrolled the Democrats' gains in Congress have become the Democratic party's and the president's favorite whipping boys. The financial industry was to blame for the subprime mortgage catastrophe. It was responsible for the recession. It bore the blame for the collapse of major financial institutions.

In all of Barack Obama's campaign speeches, you would have to search high and low to find him blaming buyers who bought a home that was beyond their means, buyers who made no down payment or buyers who lied about their income. He never blamed the reckless use of adjustable-rate mortgages that contained interest rates that would soon be beyond their means. You won't find any evidence of Obama pointing the finger of blame at the two corrupt government mortgage giants, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who bear much of the blame for the subprime scandal that has cost taxpayers untold billions of dollars in bailouts that will never be repaid.

Democratic leaders in Congress were equally myopic about the mortgage scandal, blaming it almost wholly on Wall Street, the one sector of the economy that had long eluded their efforts to engulf it in a thick web of suffocating government regulations.

Now the Democrats are on the brink of achieving their long-sought goal in the financial regulatory reform bill, which will create a powerful new federal agency with free rein to impose whatever regulations it deems necessary -- plunging the markets into uncertainty and fear.

That was the last straw for many Wall Street donors who had fattened his campaign with tens of millions of dollars in contributions, and have been a major funding source for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Congressional Campaign Committee. The money flow has dropped significantly, according to a fundraising analysis by the Washington Post.

The two campaign committees have seen a 16 percent decline in overall contributions -- raising $49.5 million in this election cycle from donors giving $1,000 or more, compared with $81.3 million at this point in the 2008 election. "Almost half of that decline in large-dollar fundraising" came from New York, the center of the financial industry, the Post found. Among the Wall Street titans who have pulled the plug:

-- Jamie Dimon, head of J.P. Morgan Chase, who has maintained an especially close relationship with Obama. He gave $65,000 to the Democratic committees in 2006 and 2008, but has given nothing to them in this cycle. And in a not-so-veiled sign of his displeasure with the president, he sent a $2,000 check to Republican Rep. Mark Kirk's campaign for Obama's former Senate seat.

-- Leon Black, co-founder of Apollo Global Management, a $53 billion private-equity firm, and his wife, Debra Black. They gave over $200,000 to the Democratic committees in the last two elections. This year: zero.

-- Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer and chairman of Goldman Sachs, gave $50,000 to the Democratic campaign committees in the 2006-08 election cycles, but has given nothing this year.

This means the Democrats will have a lot less money to spend in the next four months to defend dozens of very vulnerable House and Senate seats they are now in danger of losing.

Throw in a weak, jobless recovery, an unemployment rate that is running between 9 percent and 14 percent in more than two dozen key election states, a volatile, bearish rollercoaster stock market, and an angry, anti-Democrat electorate -- and it's clear that Obama and his party are in deep trouble. The Gallup Poll this week showed Obama's job approval rating has fallen to 44 percent, a 52-week low. So with his Wall Street supporters deserting him and his party in droves, and business leaders around the country lobbing broadside attacks on his economic policies, Obama was suddenly reinventing himself this week as a born-again free trader, pushing long pending free-trade agreements hammered out under George W. Bush that he criticized throughout his campaign and has largely ignored until now.

In a West Wing dog-and-pony show Wednesday to demonstrate that he wasn't as anti-business as his critics maintained, Obama brought in a parade of Fortune 500 CEOs, naming some of them to an Export Council to double exports over the next five years. He embraced the South Korea free trade pact that Democrats have blocked in Congress, along with pending pacts with Colombia and Panama. "Export growth leads to job growth and economic growth," Obama said. Bush couldn't have said it any better. But it was all defensive political posturing that will hardly change any minds on Wall Street or Main Street. There are the draconian tax hikes on investors and small businesses at the end of the year, and an ocean of punishing and costly regulations, all of which will impede economic growth and new job creation for years to come.

[Niuhuru]

Predictable. Now we have Jesse Jackson in the White House. Would be interesting to see if whether or not Wall Street Companies relocate overseas where they don’t hate the rich.

[mancini]

Well, you DO get what you pay for.

[originalbuckeye]

Slitting their own throats. And I thought Wall Street tycoons were bright!

[Freddd]

How convenient, Obama and the Pelosi Democrats want to distance themselves from wall street after bailing them out and rewriting finance laws in their favor and now claims they are shutting their checkbooks to them.

Elections are coming.

[Niuhuru]

Their backs are against the wall. I bet if the didn’t, Zero and his cronies would go after them, prosecuting them and confiscating their assets. Leaving them with nothing.

[Obadiah]

Oh pish-posh. Wall Street ain’t bailing on Obama. The Wall Street donors are whores. Just as they smelled a Dem takeover in 2006 and 2008 they shifted all their donations from Republicans to Democrats. Now that they smell a Republican thrashing in November they are giving to Republicans.

This is nothing more than protection money being paid to the new boss (same as the old boss). This is NOT about Wall Street coming to their senses and supporting their ideological brethren. It’s business, pure and simple.

[cranked]

Jack Squat has Geithner making the rounds .... with cushioned knee pads..... =.=

[Uncle Miltie]

"Gee, you mean 0bama meant US when he said he wanted to redistribute wealth?"

Suckers.

[originalbuckeye]

He will anyway. That’s how he operates.

[libs_kma]

"After a year of being pilloried and persecuted in Congress, many of Wall Street's donors have ended their rocky, odd-couple relationship with the Democrats and closed their checkbooks."

They've already staked their claim to idiot-of-the-year status by opening their checkbook to a dim in the first place. P.T. Barnum was right, there's one born every minute...and they keep the dim party afloat..

[Niuhuru]

Well, time for them to start applying for visas for Russia, work permits in China, the Eastern Bloc. Countries that don’t hate the rich, but want them there to invest their money in their nation’s countries.

I bet Wall Street itself relocates somewhere more business friendly. A lot of developing countries would give their eyeteeth for the prestige of having the entire major financial sector locate to their countries.

[DustyMoment]

Advice to Brutus . . . . . er, Dems - Be careful whom you stab in the back!! They may come back to bite you in the bu . . . . er, END!!!

[henkster]

“The Wall Street donors are whores. Just as they smelled a Dem takeover in 2006 and 2008 they shifted all their donations from Republicans to Democrats. Now that they smell a Republican thrashing in November they are giving to Republicans.”

All very true. And add in that in 2008, they were also paying the immediate bribe for the 700 billion dollar “bailout.” Now that they’ve gotten the “mother of all windfalls,” why spend another dime on these corrupt politicians? It’s not just Wall Street donors that are whores. So are democrat politicians. They are whores Wall Street no longer needs.

[livius]

They were idiots, but they were just thinking of Bambi as kind of a somewhat darker, thinner Clinton, not as the Marxist Muslim he is.

Suddenly, they’re awake and they realize they smell smoke. But is it too late?

Maybe.

[FreeLuna]

“How convenient, Obama and the Pelosi Democrats want to distance themselves from wall street after bailing them out and rewriting finance laws in their favor and now claims they are shutting their checkbooks to them.”

Exactly! When you take into account those new polls showing Obama does well with “people” when he attacks “Fat Cats” on Wall Street. These reports are just tactics. The progressives who rape the wealth of this nation through Wall St. will still support him.

[chiefqc]

With all the high priced CEO’s and their so called intelligence on Wall Street it seems that they are only now seeing what joe sixpack saw before mac daddy bought his election.

Stupid goes all the way to the bone.

[Vaquero]

what a bunch of limousine-liberal buttwipes......

[Buckeye McFrog]

Not shedding any tears for them. They cut their deal with the Devil and now they’ve gotta dance with him.

[Only1choice____Freedom]

Appeasement, if it works at all, is only ever temporary.

What they wanted, they got. However, it was fleeting.

[Felis_irritable]

The Wall Street donors are whores.

Thank. You. McCain was a goof, but I've never understood why people like the Wall Streeters thought they could sway someone like 0bama. Even if demo administrations have the obligatory Wall Street figurehead (e.g., Jerry Rubin), only an idiot couldn't see this coming.

Obama brought in a parade of Fortune 500 CEOs, naming some of them to an Export Council to double exports over the next five years.

Oh memememe!!!! I'll *quadruple* exports in 2 years.

I'd like to see the concrete steps these intellectuals will propose to do this. And I'd like to see a report on their progress every year. Any idiot can have ideas, getting results is the hard part. A chicken in every pot and 40 acres + a mule.

[Felis_irritable]

ROBERT Rubin. Typing + mad + posting = another commie's name rather than a Treasury Secretary.

[nathanbedford]

Many of these Wall Street leaders who gave money to Obama in the past and not now are not unlike libertarians and gold bugs who believe they are above party politics which they regard the an irrelevant sideshow, bread and circus for the masses.

If one does not believe that party affiliation means anything or, if you are like Glenn Beck and Doug Casey who believe that one party is no better than the other, there is no reason to give to either party, or conversely, it matters not which party one gives to, it matters only what you buy for the price.

Such observations cannot pass without at least a passing reference to the old saw: an honest politician is one who when he is bought, by God, stays bought.

As these libertarians become more aloof and more self-righteous in their separation from party politics, they lose sight of the fundamental values which drive party politics; values like, for example, liberty. Similarly, concern about abortion is something that never troubles their conscience because it comes not into their consciousness, it being of a nature other than financial.

They despise party politics just as libertarians do as something which soils one's hands and good name. It is all right to try to manipulate the process with a donation here and there but it is a gaucherie one avoids by daylight on Wall Street or in the dark on the upper side to betray that one actually participates or even naïvely believes in the democratic process.

The irony is that the sophisticates were bunkœd by a narcissist who played them perfectly. Some of these donors who despise the process and the politicians they think they are buying ought to take a second look at their own valets.

[OldPossum]

I was wondering how long it would take for Wall Street to wise up and realize that these are not their friends.