Whacking Wall Street should be a major 2012 campaign theme for President Obama. Most of the country is still angry at The Street for helping bring about the present unending recession, for its huge pay packets while most on Main Street have been forced to tighten their belts. And this anger is as strong among Tea Partiers as lefties.
On top of this, Mr. Obama’s very likely Republican opponent next November, Mitt Romney, is a near perfect face for a Wall Street dart board. He’s a big business, private equity, takeover guy who used a lot of borrowed money to gobble up companies and trim them down (i.e. fire workers) to position himself for a big payday with the help of Wall Street investment banks.
That’s the way this near perfect campaign issue would seem to be in place for a president who in recent months has been doing a big ‘I’m-really-a-populist’ number. Except when you look a little closer, you see why this seemingly marvelous campaign opportunity may turn out to be a problem for this president.
The reason? While these days he speaks about going after the “fat cats,” he speaks not at all about going after the fat cat enablers on Wall Street. And the reason is not just that he wants campaign contributions from The Street, but because virtually all his major in-house economic advisers have strong Wall Street connections.
‘Wall Street,’ an abbreviation for the entire financial community, would not be anyone’s target — if it were acting properly. It has major roles to play moving around capital appropriately, protecting wealth, creating well paying jobs. In recent years, however, these highly worthwhile goals have been subordinated to activities that have tended to promote austerity rather than prosperity on Main Streets around the world.
Mr Obama’s Wall Street baggage, unlike Governor Romney’s, is not the president’s own career,. It is his Oval Office adviser choices.
You want to be a real populist in a second term, Mr. Obama? More Warren and Reich. Less Geithner and Jack Lew — the latter a well-known liberal on many issues who nonetheless is yet another former Wall Street insider in this administration, another adviser who reportedly doesn’t believe Wall Street caused the recession.
More about this this writer at: The God-Awful Political Season (In Verse).