Why do they hate Obama so much?
by digby
Here's a fun parlor game: what do you think is driving Wall Street to be so contemptuous of President Obama when he's treated them with kid gloves?
The source of the problem between Obama and Wall Street is, in a word, naivete. Back in 2008, the article notes, Obama’s Wall Street backers considered him “a reflection of their imagined best selves: brainy, self-made, above the mewlings and histrionics of partisan politics.” Obama, like them, believed deeply in empirical evidence and rational argument. If elected, they assumed, he’d make decisions the way they did: purely on the merits.
Matt Yglesias thinks they are just looking at their own economic well being like everyone else:
Steep recessions and sluggish subsequent growth have a really negative impact on the wealth and incomes of a wide range of people. That includes wealthy finance guys and jobless young people and underwater middle class homeowners and everyone. And the natural human instinct when you wind up with less pie than you thought you could reasonably expect is to assume that the people in charge gave your pie to someone else. So Wall Street feels that run-amok populism has impoverished them (relative to expectations) for roughly the same reasons that Obama's liberal critics feel that his constant succor of the banksters has impoverished them—everyone is poorer than they thought they were going to be.
I have written many times that I think they are a bunch of overfed, privileged twits who can't stand the fact that they've lost their exalted social position now that they've been exposed for frauds.
And there's yet another possibility: perhaps this is all poker playing --- withholding donations in hopes of keeping the president in line. This article indicates that the Obama campaign is trying very hard to get those dollars. Maybe all these job creatin' winners are just holding out for the right deal.
It's always possible that it's a combination of all these things. But what's most interesting to me is that in all these cases, these people care nothing for the health of the financial system itself and only care about their own personal wealth, which they falsely believe has been stymied by government rather than the self-created systemic problems that caused the 2008 crash. That indicates that rather than being people who make decisions "on the merits" we are dealing with irrational, irresponsible fools who are blaming the wrong culprits --- indeed, they are blaming the very institution that kept the system alive so they could live to pillage another day.
This is why I lean toward the spoiled aristocrat thesis. These are people who have come to believe their own hype --- they aren't just rich Masters of the Universe. They are Gods who must be worshiped by the polloi. The idea that they are "disappointed" in the president --- or their portfolios --- makes no sense in light of this:
I'm sure they had originally expected the Dow to be far higher than this by now. I don't know when these people got it in their head that capitalism was all about "certainty" but if they really believe that they need to get into a different business. Considering that many of the boys at the very top were responsible for that crash in the first place, they really should be grateful to have had such a nice run-up since the trough in 2009. And nobody's gone to jail and nobody's even had to give back their ill-gotten gains. If they had any decency at all they'd just quietly go about their business and hope nobody notices that they're doing very well while everyone else is still mired in the muck they left in their wake.
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