Whining One Percenters

NY magazine has a rather mundane piece on the Wall Street wizards who are just shocked and dismayed that anyone thinks they don't deserve their ill-gotten gains. But a couple of points interested me. First, a quibble about the long tribute to famous resignee Jake DeSantis. They fail to mention that Jake didn't actually quit after all. But this bit was striking.

It should come as no surprise that being a banker—indeed, simply being rich—is going to be a lot less fun under an Obama administration. In winter 2007, as the Democratic-primary contest got under way, Obama showed up at a Goldman Sachs client meeting to explain his economic agenda to a conference room full of potential campaign contributors. When he opened up the session to questions from the audience, one attendee lobbed the question that was surely on the mind of everyone in the room. “Are you going to raise my taxes?”

Obama looked out across the millionaires sitting around him. “Yes,” he answered, without a flicker of hesitation, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

During the campaign, Obama was never shy about his promise to undo the Bush tax policies. But it was easy to ignore his occasional lapses into populist rhetoric and focus on his intense intelligence and Ivy League education. Now, in the wake of the crisis, Wall Street’s politics are shifting rightward. “All the rich people I know took George Bush for granted,” says an analyst at a midtown hedge fund. “I’m a Democrat, but I agree with Rush Limbaugh on a lot of this stuff,” rails the wife of a former AIG executive.

I'd guess they figured Obama was one of them, meaning the Ivy League elite, and he would pull the usual bait and switch once he was elected. Obama's been doing a lot of things that I vehemently disagree with, but it strikes me as professional politicians go, he's the closest thing we've seen to an honest one in a very long time and no one really knows quite how to deal with him.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]