The big Wall Street types will tell you that, as bad as things have gotten with President Obama and his disastrous economic policies, help could be on the way in the form of President Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Keep in mind, this bunch bet heavily back in 2007 and 2008 that then-candidate Barack Obama was “a moderate” (a term used by BlackRock chief Larry Fink to describe Obama in ’08), shoveling lots of money his way. And the same crew in 2012 bet big that Mitt Romney had what it took to expose Obamanomics as the disaster it had become.
But the chief executives of big companies, including the nation’s big banks, are never short of confidence, including on subjects they know almost nothing about — such as the current state of the Democratic Party.
As the big bankers see it, the biggest problem this country faces comes from Tea Party conservatives and their doctrinaire approach to government that led to last year’s government shutdown. To them, Clinton represents a return to 1990s sanity — when President Bill Clinton embraced big business, including the deregulation of the banking industry, with a degree of moderation that both pulled people together and produced strong economic growth.
Maybe that’s why Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein late last year shelled out an estimated $400,000 to hear Hillary speak at the big Wall Street firm’s “Builders and Innovators Summit.” (No word yet on whether she gave Goldman traders some tips on how to score big on cattle futures.)
And why Fink, the chief of the world’s largest money-management firm, thought it was prudent to appoint to his board a Hillary confidante with little if any financial experience — namely Cheryl Mills, a Democratic political operative who served as Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department.
I’m told Fink desperately wants to be Treasury secretary, which is part of why he’s looking toward Hillary as a savior. The other part is that he, like Blankfein and the many other Democrats among the nation’s top chief executives, are so blinded by their obsession with Republican hard-liners that they haven’t observed how the anti-business hard left is now the most powerful force inside the Democratic Party.
They blame the problems in the party now on the peculiar disposition of President Obama, which is more his arrogance than his ideology. Business executives who’ve sat down with him jokingly refer to their meetings as the “Four Ls” because, as one recently put it to me, “He arrives late; he doesn’t listen; he lectures them and then he leaves.”
Yet they’re leaving out a fifth “L” — that Obama’s a liberal, or even a lefty. His arrogance with businessmen even in his own party is all about ideology — one that thinks business is so inherently bad it needs to be regulated, reshaped and crushed, which is exactly what he did to the financial sector after the financial crisis and what he’s doing now to the health-care system.
In other words, the leaders of Occupy Wall Street are more important to these new Democrats than either Fink or Blankfein.
As for the moderate virtues of the Clintons, well: It was none other than Bill Clinton who just administered the oath of office to one of the more left-wing politicians in the country — our very own mayor, Comrade Bill de Blasio.
The ex-president and his allegedly moderate wife sat through the entire bizarre inauguration ceremony listening to de Blasio, Public Advocate Letitia James and others continue with their absurd lefty campaign theme that New York is such a “tale of two cities” that the already-overtaxed middle class and alleged rich need to be taxed more to redistribute even more of their wealth in a city that is one of the most redistributionist places in the country.
The Clintons didn’t even blink as speaker after speaker took shots at ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, himself in attendance, as if he was a Tea Party organizer rather than one of the more progressive politicians in America. Nor did they raise an eyebrow when one speaker, entertainer and political activist Harry Belafonte, called the Bloomberg years “Dickensian” while another referred to the city under Mayor Mike as a “plantation.”
How that’s for moderation?
Sorry, Larry and Lloyd, this isn’t Bill Clinton’s business-friendly Democratic Party anymore, which is why both Clintons sat through all the nonsense without uttering a peep. This is the Democratic Party of Comrade Bill and President Obama, of alleged plantations, higher taxes and socialized medicine. And Hillary is getting on board because she knows it’s the only way to survive.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.