Free Bought and Paid For by Charles Gasparino Page B

economy. McCain would be a disaster.”
    At this point, explaining some of Obama’s blind spots—his liberal voting record, his associations with Ayers and Wright, and his plan to balance the budget while expanding the war on terror to include Afghanistan, creating a new health-care entitlement, and proposing nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending—could do little to convince any of Obama’s many Wall Street supporters that they had made the mistake of a lifetime. Not only were they thrilled to support a winner and someone who so eloquently articulated their own desires to change the world (as long as they made their millions in the process), but they simply hated McCain because they knew he hated them.
    And as the election season wore on, they came to love Obama. In addition to meeting with the bankers at Johnny’s Half Shell, Obama continued to meet with the big Wall Street executives throughout 2007 and 2008 at fund-raisers and private events, where he came across as nothing short of a moderate. If John McCain was sneering and screaming at Paulson about the mess his friends on Wall Street had put his campaign and the country in, Obama calmly asked for advice in fixing the system. Yes, that’s right, advice. He was asking the very men who had created the problem to come up with ways to fix it. He wanted a partnership to spur the economy that would help him do all the great things he wanted to do, from fixing the health-care problem to creating a “green” economy to help save the environment.

    â€œAnd who could be against that?” Jamie Dimon quipped one afternoon, as he thought back on the reasons he found Obama so refreshing. Dimon, the son of a stockbroker, who had been working on Wall Street ever since he graduated from Harvard Business School, saw so much he admired in Obama that while he didn’t officially support Obama (press aides say that because he was on the Federal Reserve Board he couldn’t overtly support anyone) he let it be known that he wanted his top executives to do what they could to get this breath of fresh air elected. And they did, and they weren’t alone.
    They had good reason, because Obama seemed so smart and polished and, most of all, moderate to the Wall Street titans, people like Larry Fink, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Greg Fleming, and many others. As much as Dimon loved Obama, he couldn’t hold a candle to the love shown by Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs.
    In September 2008, when the financial collapse was at its peak and Wall Street’s world was collapsing, Goldman contributed $596,000 to the Democrats, including then candidate Obama, nearly eight times what it gave the Republicans that month. JPMorgan Chase gave nearly $230,000 to the Democrats, nearly two and a half times what it gave the Republicans.
    Obama rewarded the bankers’ expectations and eagerly filled key jobs in the administration with their surrogates, who quickly enacted policies that added to their bottom lines during the next two years and further supported the notion that the big banks must be kept alive at all costs.
    Yet with the surge in profits during 2009 and into 2010 came something that not even President Obama saw coming: a surge in outrage. Obama had planned a massive stimulus package to stop the rising unemployment he was saddled with. The plan was simple: Give states money to fund infrastructure projects, and people would be put back to work. That was the theory Obama sold to Congress, which in turn sold it to an increasingly desperate public. The reality was far different. The states hoarded the cash and kept their bloated bureaucracies in place. To be sure, some of those “shovel-ready” jobs were in fact created, but not enough, not even close to spur the economy into hiring, and unemployment skyrocketed. In some industries, like construction, joblessness rose to above 20 percent.

    Wall Street’s support for Obama certainly