Wonkbook: Will Obama occupy Wall Street?
Since its launch, Occupy Wall Street has gotten support from some high profile, and occasionally even unexpected, sympathizers. Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum headed down to the protest to play a set. Kanye West and Russell Simmons toured Zuccotti Park. Personal-finance guru Suze Orman wrote to "public say thank you" to the protesters. Mohammed el-Erian, who leads one of the largest bond trading firms in the world, declaredhimself in agreement with the protester's desire to shrink the finance sector.
Luoisiana Harris, 7, from Brooklyn, joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters as they marched from their base in Zuccotti Park toward Washington Square for a rally Oct. 15. Photo Gallery: Protests against Wall Street continues (DAVID KARP - AP)But all that was child's play. Kid's stuff. A march that just goes to the end of the block and back. Because it looks increasingly like Occupy Wall Street is roping in the biggest prize of all: President Obama.
My colleague Peter Wallsten reports that "President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy." That isn't to say you'll find the president in Zuccotti Park with a sign and a sleeping bag anytime soon. But if Occupy Wall Street began lending out its organizers -- at least the ones that want to participate in the political system -- as campaign strategists, I think it's a good bet they would sound something like this: “12 months from now, as people make the decision about who to go vote for, the gut check is going to be about, ‘Who would make decisions more about helping my life than Wall Street?’ ”
But that's no protester. That's David Plouffe, the president's primary political adviser. And he is, to some degree, trying to make a virtue out of necessity. In 2008, Obama had heavy support from Wall Street. In 2012, after the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation reform bill, he doesn't. Instead, as the New York Times reported over the weekend, it's Mitt Romney who has emerged as Wall Street's darling: He's raised $1.5 million from the industry, while Obama is stuck below $300,000. The change is perhaps starkest at Goldman Sachs, which gave Obama's 2008 campaign more money than any other private employer in the country. So far, Romney has hauled in about $350,000 from the firm's employees. Obama has gotten less than $50,000.
Obama has not been nearly as tough on Wall Street as Wall Street seems to think he's been. The exception the finance industry taken to the applause lines in his occasional forays into populism and to a financial-regulation bill that works to contain blowups in their industry rather than fundamentally reshape it, is striking. But now that Wall Street has a new prince and Obama is a man in desperate search of a winning message, the president's reelection team is finding a lot to like in the chord Occupy Wall Street has struck.
