Obama And Wall Street: Romance Renewed

After their fake break up, everyone is friends again!

WASHINGTON — 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 first goal was to get recognition that the administration has led the economy from an unimaginably difficult place to where we are today,” said Blair W. Effron, an investment banker closely involved in Mr. Obama’s fund-raising efforts. “Now the second goal is to turn that into support.”

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.

I'm sure the discussion over those "hot button issues" was intense.

The Deficit: "The only thing that is off the table is enforcing our corporate tax laws"

Hedge fund regulation: "Uhhh, maybe later?"

Jail: "Don't worry, Holder's got his priorities in order!"

I also love that these TITANS OF CAPITALISM have the emotinal makeup of middle school lovers. Yeah, he gave us tons of money, protected our bonuses and refuses to prosecute the fraud we commited... but he called us "fat cats" and WORDS HURT!

Ratcheting up the stupid, the article includes a quote from a hedge fund manager who supported Obama in 2008 but is backing Romney this time because "I’m really not an ideological guy, and I think the country right now needs more practical, less partisan people." (Vomit everywhere)

And going back to the depressing, this section seems pretty telling:

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.

It should also be noted that with this much attention focused on courting this class of donors, issues that matter to these donors will take priority. Issues that don't, wont.

There's not a high unemployment rate among hedge fund managers, in case you haven't noticed.