The clueless Wall Street elite
by David Atkins
Greg Sargent highlighted today this remarkable excerpt from an upcoming New York Times Magazine story on the Obama administration’s fundraising troubles with Wall Street:
One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.
Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota. He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.
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.
Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.
One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads in disbelief.
“Most people in the financial world,” a top Obama donor later told me, “do not understand how most of America feels about them.” But they think they understand how the president’s inner circle feels about them. “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.”
It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the top 0.1% in this country is completely disconnected from the experience of the broader public, to the extent that it’s difficult to tell the difference between cloistered cluelessness and rank sociopathy. One doesn’t really get a grasp of how profound the problem is unless one sees the statistics. They really have no clue. I did focus groups a while back with left-leaning independent voters; when asked about Wall Street, their rhetoric became violent and even murderous at times. And it’s not surprising: when men like Edward Conard open their mouths, it’s difficult to maintain restraint. One never knows if one is dealing with a purely evil sociopath, or with someone who has been so sheltered by their wealth as to not really understand the human experience anymore.
So they also don’t understand that a Democratic president who has been infuriating his base by putting himself squarely between the bankers and pitchforks is a valuable asset to them. As Greg Sargent says:
Wall Street excess helped lead to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, inflicting untold economic suffering on millions and millions of Americans. In both rhetorical and substantive terms, the Obama administration’s response was by any reasonable measure moderate and restrained. Indeed, Obama clearly viewed himself as a buffer between Wall Street and rising populist passion, telling a group of bankers in April of 2009: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
Despite all the wailing, Obama’s subsequent Wall Street reform bill simply was not a threat to the established order of things in any meaningful sense. His call for a Buffett Rule and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts would do nothing to halt growing inequality, which has been exacerbated by trends that have been underway for decades. His push for higher taxes on the wealthy has only been about spreading the sacrifice necessary to close the deficit, and about funding measures to create jobs for working and middle class Americans who continue to suffer, even as Wall Street is now reaping huge profits. In speech after speech after speech, Obama affirms that there’s no begrudging the wealthy their success.
Yet despite all this, many Wall Streeters have responded with an extraordinary outburst of resentment, grievance, and self pity. They’ve shoveled enormous sums of money in the direction of the party whose main driving objective is to roll back everything in the way of new oversight Obama and Dems have put into place in response to the worst meltdown in decades.
One wonders if there is anything Obama could say to make these people happy, short of declaring that rampant inequality is a good thing,
No, there’s nothing the President can say to make them happy. There are only three choices here:
1) accept the system as is and give in to complete plutocratic rule;
2) try to win elections with the full measure of their spending against us and see what happens; or
3) Fight like hell to change the campaign finance system.
The fact that these people can buy elections is one of the few things saving them from the pitchforks. Otherwise, Jim Messina wouldn’t bother to be in the same room with these self-important unelected bubble-inflating buffoons. The best thing to do is to limit their access to cornering the political marketplace.
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