Free Bought and Paid For by Charles Gasparino Page A

would go to bat for Wall Street; he didn’t have a close personal relationship with any of the big CEOs, as Obama had with Gallogly, with Bob Wolf of UBS, later with Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, or with Blankfein’s number two, Gary Cohn, who was an early supporter. In fact, based on his conversations with Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman (and Blankfein’s ex-boss), it seemed that McCain was so angered by the burgeoning financial crisis and what it had done to his campaign (turned an even race into one that favored Obama) that he seemed like a guy who, if he had his way, would let them all, Goldman included, simply fail.
    Another possible reason for the bankers’ support of Obama over McCain was McCain’s natural distrust of their motives.

    â€œWhy the fuck would you do that?” snapped McCain into his cell phone, his face turning red and his finger jabbing in the air as if he were pointing right at his target. He wasn’t, of course. The target, Treasury secretary Paulson, was at the White House, where he had just unveiled the latest bailout plan for Wall Street: a multihundred-billion-dollar program to keep Wall Street alive.
    The financial crisis had severely wounded the McCain campaign, which made the old fighter pilot even more ornery toward Wall Street types like the Goldman banker turned Treasury secretary. And now McCain felt that the crisis and the government’s solution—to just give the banks money to prop them up—would put his campaign on life support.
    McCain was huddled with campaign chief Rick Davis and advisers Greg Wendt and Douglas Holtz-Eakin in a conference room in his campaign headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, overlooking Reagan National Airport.
    It was a few weeks after Lehman’s failure, and the financial system was still in shambles, with banks losing money, losing clients, and falling into insolvency. Paulson said the new batch of money—and he recognized it was indeed a lot of money—was needed to save the banking system and the economy. Without massive direct infusions of capital the big banks—nearly every firm, including his old firm—were doomed. And if that happened, no one would lend, no one would borrow. The banking system would shut down. The economy, already in a fragile state, would collapse. Think bread lines and the Great Depression.
    McCain wasn’t buying the entire sob story. What little he knew of Wall Street he didn’t like. He considered most of the people who ran the banks spoiled brats and ruthless opportunists. Why wouldn’t they just take the money, wait out the panic, and then begin using the taxpayer funds to pay themselves big bucks, with bonus season quickly approaching?
    McCain’s advisers weren’t witness to the whole conversation, just McCain’s blunt responses, bitten lips, and angry gesticulations as he listened to Paulson explain the plan. “Huh? What the fuck?” McCain said at one point. “How the fuck can you trust them?” he screamed at another.
    He was, of course, right not to trust Wall Street, which, just weeks after getting its collective ass saved, handed out billions in bonuses to traders and bankers (Goldman doled out $4 billion in bonuses in the bailout year). That was of little consequence to McCain, who reluctantly went on to publicly endorse the Paulson bailouts and lose the election, in large measure because he lost Wall Street support—the millions of dollars in campaign contributions that other Republicans often count on to combat attack ads like those that Barack Obama unleashed in all those battleground states that McCain lost.
    â€œThank God he’s not our president,” one senior Wall Street executive told me, referring to McCain, the day after Barack Obama made history and became the nation’s first African American president. “Obama is at least smart; he’ll know what to do about the