Lie Down With Dogs
By Mitch Berg
I run into this over and over again; Democrats in debates or discussions who accept as a matter of faith that “republicans are the party of the rich, and the tics are the party of the working people”.
I ask them why, then, that the Plains states and the West – which are, demographically, very disproportionally “working people” – vote so reliably Republican. They usually respond by calling me a racist and a sexist and asking why I hate children.
But I digress.
The claim, of course, beggars all the evidence. My favorite factoid; in the 2002 Senate campaign, the average Coleman contribution was about a fifth that of the average Wellstone donation – but they raised about the same total.
Of course, plutocrats like Warren Buffet, George Soros and Bill Gates, to say nothing of a uniform cross-section of Hollywood’s super-wealthy, have long supported the Democrats; for the fantastically wealthy, a regulated society is a predictable (and, for currency speculators like Soros, exploitable) one.
And in the last election, Wall Street contributors backed Obama over Mac.
There might be a bit of morning-after remorse from that last, though:
Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.
A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”
The bad news is that people on Wall Street seem to be very stupid.
The good news? Michelle Obama’s campaign claim that our best and brightest go into hedge funds rather than teaching and nursing would seem to be wrong.
“These big companies are based in New York Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, where Democrats dominate,” [Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute] said. “Obama’s tax plan is already cleaving him from his big corporate supporters,” he said.Mr Obama made no secret of his plans to raise taxes on the “working rich” (individuals earning more than $200,000) by imposing a top income tax rate of almost 40 per cent, and there is little surprise that those plans remain on track, even during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Note to self and world; next time, let the whole gabbling bunch of Brooks-Brothers-clad cretins go bankrupt.
