Noam Scheiber reports on J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s souring relationship with Barack Obama. The Obama administration’s deep ties to Wall Street won’t come as a surprise to anyone who reads NRO, but it’s worth excerpting a few passages here:

But there was one invite decision that did seem vaguely curious: the omission of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Unlike Citigroup or Lehman Brothers, Dimon’s firm never teetered on the edge of collapse. Nor is JP Morgan run, à la Goldman, like a giant hedge fund backed by taxpayers. While the bank does have a significant trading operation, much of its revenue comes from dowdy loans to industrial companies and individual homeowners.
On top of which, Dimon is a longtime Democrat who traces his friendship with Obama back to Chicago, where he spent years running a predecessor company. For that matter, he’s not just any Chicago Democrat with ties to Obama, but one who’s spent the last few years painstakingly bolstering his bank’s presence in Washington. In 2007, Dimon famously told his board that the company’s government outreach was subpar and gave himself a “D” for his role in it. He elevated Bill Daley, the Democratic power broker who was then the bank’s Midwestern chairman, to his operating committee and handed him the government-relations portfolio.
This proved to be a coup when Obama won the presidency. Daley had doubled as the campaign’s co-chair. He’d been close to David Axelrod, Obama’s top adviser, for 30 years. He’d also helped revive the career of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel after Hillary Clinton exiled him from the White House inner sanctum in 1993. It was Daley who arranged to have Emanuel detailed to the administration’s NAFTA war room, which he oversaw. According to sources close to the administration, the Obama transition team approached Daley about becoming ambassador to China. (He declined.)

And:

In many ways, [Dimon’s liberalism] is in keeping with the historical archetype of the Wall Street progressive. For over a century, the standard model of government engagement—largely refined at JP Morgan itself—involved a seamless blending of public and private interest. The tradition dates back to George Perkins, a top lieutenant to the company’s namesake and a friend of Teddy Roosevelt. As Ron Chernow notes in The House of Morgan, his history of the banking dynasty, Perkins was a prolific writer who helped promote Roosevelt’s evolving vision of bigness—big industrial trusts to power the economy and a big government to check them. Perkins dubbed it “socialism of the highest, best, and most ideal sort.” (Left unsaid was that the Morgans typically dominated the private side of this arrangement.) Successive generations of Morgan men faithfully hewed to this pattern, partly out of recognition that the country’s most powerful bank needed to be seen as acting in the nation’s interest so as to defuse populist resentment.

And finally:

At certain moments, the banks couldn’t tell if the administration was harnessing populist frustrations or getting pulled along by them. Administration officials seemed to relish pointing out the ways Wall Street was undermining reform. Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin dwelled on the “one point four million dollars per day already being spent … by big banks and Wall Street financial firms” in a speech before the Chamber of Commerce. Whatever the case, the atmosphere was rapidly deteriorating. On a Sunday in mid-May, hundreds of protestors converged on Scher’s home in suburban Maryland.
The executives at JP Morgan reacted to these developments with growing dismay. Under Dimon, they’d heavily favored Democrats in their giving to congressional campaign committees. Last fall, the company held fundraisers for the campaign arms of both the House and Senate Republicans, according to sources familiar with the events. As one friend of Dimon’s told me recently, “It’s hard for him to support the people he thinks are out to crush his bank.”

Poor, under-appreciated, liberal bank CEO Jamie Dimon. On the other hand, would he really have fared much better under President McCain?