Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook column on the wealthy Wall Streeters who are abandoning President Obama has garnered considerable attention, and for good reason. Sorkin offers a provocative thesis as to why Barack Obama flattered the egos of the hedge fund elite as a candidate, and why he’s disappointed them in office:
The prevailing view is that bankers, hedge fund mangers and traders supported the Obama candidacy because he appealed to their egos.
Mr. Obama was viewed as a member of the elite, an Ivy League graduate (Columbia, class of ’83, the same as Mr. Loeb), president of The Harvard Law Review — he was supposed to be just like them. President Obama was the “intelligent” choice, the same way they felt about themselves. They say that they knew he would seek higher taxes and tighter regulation; that was O.K. What they say they did not realize was that they were going to be painted as villains.
The more interesting political question, in my view, is whether this prefigures a broader shift among college-educated upper-middle-class voters. Ron Brownstein of National Journal has kept a close eye on the diverging views of lower-middle-class and upper-middle-class voters. In a July column, Brownstein returned to two representative Denver suburbs he visited during the 2008 presidential campaign:
On July 4, 2008, I visited these two communities and found them starkly divided over the presidential race. White working-class voters in Littleton expressed doubts about Barack Obama’s priorities, experience, and even loyalty, while Centennial’s college-educated professionals were enthusiastic about his candidacy.
Brownstein found that while Littleton voters had no personal animus towards the president, they did see him as a Big Government liberal who didn’t fill them with much confidence. Centennial voters had a somewhat more favorable view:
But if Obama’s support hasn’t crumbled in Centennial, it has cracked. Mark Neifert voted for Obama, but he plans to vote Republican this year because he believes that much of the stimulus was wasted on special interests. Divided government, he says, “would provide a balance” and discourage “abuse of power.” In both communities, conservative critics who feel that Obama has dangerously expanded Washington’s role appear much more engaged than his supporters. Conservatives are drawing energy from a trinity of Obama provocations: deficits, federal spending, and bailouts that they believe ignored the virtues of “creative destruction.”
Ultimately, the hedge fund donors won’t make much of a difference. They can help swell the paychecks of political professionals, but they have less influence than they like to think, hyperventilating press accounts notwithstanding. What will make a difference is if voters in the dual-earner households that proved such a valuable source of Democratic votes in the last two cycles decide to give conservative candidates a chance. This is a constituency that has been spared the worst of the Great Stagnation — the unemployment rate among the college-educated is below 5 percent — yet that is experiencing at some economic anxiety due to a combination of deleveraging, general uncertainty, and a sense that they’re forced to run in place.
This is at least one reason why the effort to pain various Republican candidates as racist or otherwise extreme is so vitally important to the Democratic leadership. Success in this regard can help contain the damage from a lackluster economy by either demotivating upper-middle-class voters or keeping them in the Democratic fold.
