Meanwhile, just a few short months ago, from the NYT, we find this (with thanks to David Limbaugh): “Obama Seeks to Win Back Wall St. Cash”:
A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.
The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.
Mr. Obama, who enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them “fat cats” and criticizing their bonuses, followed up the meeting with phone calls to those who could not attend.
The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.
Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.
[…]
The president’s top financial industry supporters say they are confident that the support Mr. Obama needs will ultimately be there, despite the financial industry’s unhappiness over his efforts to tighten regulation of their businesses. But it is clear that those supporters will have to work much harder to win over the financial services industry than they did in 2008, before Wall Street’s bust, the subsequent clashes over policy and the sometimes bitter personal differences that lingered afterward.
Executives at large investment banks, a group that gave generously to Mr. Obama in his last campaign, are remaining on the sidelines for now. Only a small handful of such donors have appeared in Mr. Obama’s joint campaign filings with the Democratic National Committee, though officials there said more would appear in the coming weeks.
Some traditional heavy hitters in Democratic Wall Street fund-raising have stepped out of the game. They include Maureen White and her husband, Steven L. Rattner, a founder of the Quadrangle Group, whose Fifth Avenue living room was a critical conduit between Wall Street and Democratic candidates in the years before Mr. Rattner joined the Obama administration to help restructure the auto industry. The couple did not resume their old role after Mr. Rattner left government, and he was caught up last year in an investigation into kickbacks to New York’s state pension fund.
And even as some criticize the president for listening too closely, they say, to Wall Street on issues like the 2008 bailout and financial regulation, he has suffered some unusually public defections and criticism by some former Wall Street supporters, who view his policies and rhetoric as unfair to their industry. Many are Republicans whose support last time around burnished his image as a post-partisan problem solver.
[…]
To offset those defections, Mr. Obama’s campaign has deployed a corps of loyal Wall Street supporters who have fanned out to defend the president’s record and stoke fatigued donors. They include Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; the hedge fund managers Orin S. Kramer and Eric Mindich; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.
Mr. Mindich and Mr. Wolf were among those at the White House meeting, along with some prominent names from the hedge fund world: James G. Dinan of York Capital Management, Glenn Dubin of Highbridge Capital Management and Paul Tudor Jones.
Members of the president’s economic team and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, a former banking executive, have been more active in reaching out to Wall Street executives about policy issues, donors said, along with Mr. Messina and Patrick Gaspard, the D.N.C.’s executive director.
The campaign and its allies are also seeking to recruit a new group of high-level bundlers, supporters who recruit other donors. They include Antonio Weiss, the global head of investment banking at Lazard; Charles Myers, a senior managing director at Evercore Partners; and James E. Staley, the head of JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank.
The campaign is also courting prominent Wall Street figures who could serve as Mr. Obama’s ambassadors at firms known for leaning Republican: Lenard B. Tessler, a managing director at Cerberus Capital who donated to Mr. Romney and Mrs. Clinton in 2008, and Hamilton E. James, the president of the private equity behemoth Blackstone.
[…]
[…] One Democratic financier invited to this month’s dinner, who asked for anonymity because he did not want to anger the White House, said it was ironic that the same president who once criticized bankers as “fat cats” would now invite them to dine at Daniel, where the six-course tasting menu runs to $195 a person.
The donor declined the invitation.
Meh. Beats shitting in a bag, right?
Obama: standing for the 99%, just so long as he doesn’t have to stand with the filthy rabble.
Obama — with Wall Street before he was against Wall Street!
Drudge has a picture of his hoochie pretending to paint a wall for minimum wage or something
now I ask you who does that bitch think she’s fooling?
Obama…atop the heap of the EVIIIL! 1%’ers.
Remember when Wall Street bank execs were called on the White House carpet and Obama told them he was all that was standing between them and the mob? It’s too bad none of them had the wit to ask him which way he was facing.
OT
Jeff got mentioned on Instapundit this morning. Congrats, dude!
Oops, forgot the linky:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/129929/
In the future, everyone will get an Instalanche for 15 minutes.
Are there actually any corporate headquarters on Wall Street? I thought it was mainly a place where stocks and commodities were exchanged.
The traders don’t care. Or, rather: they do care, as long as it’s a moneymaking opportunity.
I’m angry at Wall Street bankers. However, I sure as hell know better than to appeal to a piece of shit wannabe socialist who has enlisted the help of these too big to fail crony capitalists.
Its called a shakedown. Its the only real job Obama has ever had
Shtetl, yeah, if it looks like a shakedown it probably is. With this administration, anyway.
Jonah on C-SPAN:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/OccupyWa
Fun With Callers.
Wall Street to Dems: you can’t have it both ways
Related to #13.
“Romney Beating Obama in a Fight for Wall St. Cash“
run run rudolph wall street romney buys the christmas!
St. Cindy arrested.
And.
This ought to really help to stop those thefts going on at OWS.
“I’m angry at Wall Street bankers.”
That’s like being angry with a tiger for being a tiger.
Business has one interest. Make money. Doesn’t matter if it’s have a hot dog cart or a Swiss bank, the object is to make money. If they are a legitimate business, they make a good faith effort to follow the law. If they have investors and employees, they have a responsibility under the law to honor those commitments. Anything within the law is legitimate business, and getting mad at a business operating within the law, and being responsible for their investors and employees interests, is a misplaced emotion.
Blame the politicians tinkering with the free economy, not those trying to survive the environment.
Or, in other words, be pissed at the concept and creation of “too big to fail” by government policy.
demand an investigation into what they say was an “unprovoked assault” on a protester by police last week.
Would that be the guy “run over” by a motorcycle officer who was moving at barely walking speed… who then did his best fake-wresting “I’m injured! I’m injured!” rolling around on the ground moves? Seriously, watch the video. The guy is pathetically transparent.
And as far as the “unprovoked” part goes, I seem to recall reports that bottles and bags of garbage were being thrown at cops by the “99 percent intelligence free” protesters.
Thursday morning links…
Mrs. BD likes this gardening site Japanese mathematician breaks record for determining the value of pi The Western World: We are better than them Man living as an ‘adult baby’ is cleared of Social Security fraud A Long, Steep Drop for Americans’…