By Roger Madon
Today’s Wall Street Journal’s front page is blazoned with the head line in bold: “Financiers Switch to GOP.”
Let see if I got this straight: Wall Street financiers, based upon the popular argot are Capitalists that support Socialists, otherwise known as Democrats? Say it isn’t so. But it is.
In fact I knew this back in 1998 when I first ran for the New York State Assembly as a Republican on the Upper West Side, a district one could only describe as the last bastion of Socialism since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The first thing I did to raise money was take the 1 train to Wall Street. I figured, naively, that here was a bunch of guys, some girls too, who would support my campaign, especially since I was running against a Democrat who had all the characteristics of Lenin who got on the train at 72nd Street rather than Finland station.
The article in the Journal describes these captains of the universe, having put millions of dollars into candidate Obama’s 2008 war chest as disappointed with him as president. What boggled my mind in 1998 was that when I approached these captains of the universe I interpreted their refusal to give me any money to challenge a socialist was a matter of principle.
Well, now we know it’s not the principle of the thing but the fact that they bet on the wrong horse. And never underestimate a hedge fund manager’s ability to change course when the bet he made goes south.