Free Bought and Paid For by Charles Gasparino

reform through Congress.” (The notion of financial reform being “bullshit” is something we’ll discuss later in this book, but suffice to say, Wall Street is already finding ways to dance around the legislation.)
    If you think the facts behind the financial collapse are complicated, the story of why the financial services firms went out of their way to support Obama is really quite simple. Simply put, in Obama they saw an ally, someone who would support them while in McCain they saw someone who at best was noncommittal to thier agenda. The former POW and famously cantankerous senator never had much of a relationship with Wall Street for two reasons: First, he was a senator from Arizona, not exactly a financial services mecca, and for the most part, he couldn’t stand being in the same room with guys who compared trading bonds for a living with warfare. As a man who had survived the brutality of war in the most literal sense, he found their talk unbearable.
    And it was an attitude that permeated his staff. “These guys couldn’t give a shit about what we think,” an exasperated Steve Schwarzman snapped at an aide when he came back from a strategy session at McCain campaign headquarters in Washington. As opposed to his former partner Gallogly, Schwarzman was a staunch Republican. But the founder of the private-equity giant Blackstone with a net worth well into the billions of dollars wasn’t used to being told his views didn’t have much merit, even if that was the message he received from McCain’s staffer one afternoon. The actual message delivered to Schwarzman from the McCain aide was actually more polite, primarily because it was delivered by the aide and not by McCain himself. But the meaning was the same. It was as if the old man, who despite his temper can be disarmingly charming, had told Schwarzman to “shut the fuck up,” as he had told so many people during his long political career.
    Even so, Schwarzman was one of the few Wall Street executives who continued supporting McCain, and not just because he was a registered Republican. He had actually listened to some of Obama’s plans while other CEOs were busy swooning over the rock star who would be president.
    â€œThey didn’t add up,” he remarked at the time. Listen closely, Schwarzman told his friends, most of whom didn’t believe him, and beneath the soothing rhetoric is a radical agenda of spending, spending, and more spending. Schwarzman couldn’t understand why his friends on the Street—and he knew just about everyone of note at every major bank—didn’t understand what they were supporting; they worked on Wall Street, after all, so why couldn’t they add?
    It dawned on him after attending a few meetings with both John McCain and his staff. “This guy just doesn’t give a shit about what we think,” he thought, and Obama did. With that Schwarzman also concluded that his own vote and the money he would like to raise for McCain would be overwhelmed by the Wall Street juggernaut lining up behind the community activist turned Wall Street’s best friend.
    McCain, it should be noted, did have some other Wall Street supporters, most notably Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain , but the rest of the Street, it appears, abandoned him. Why? In various interviews, some of the Wall Street CEOs and their senior staff told me they didn’t want another four years of what they saw as the failed policies of the Bush administration. Others say they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a ticket that included Sarah Palin, who they believed was insufficiently educated in foreign affairs or, for that matter, anything else. To the Wall Street elite, as to most of the East Coast intelligentsia, the notion of what they saw as this rube from Alaska being the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency was unthinkable.
    John McCain, meanwhile, never came across as a guy who