John Heilemann is a progressive, and thus believes that Wall Street greed and deregulation, not government mortgage policies, caused the financial crisis, Obama saved capitalism when he should perhaps have simply nationalized the entire financial industry, and those deluded bankers don’t understand the righteous anger of the workers and the peasants. It is the moderate Obama, you see, that has been standing between them and the pitchfork-waving mob.

Personally, I think all that is a crock, but Heilemann’s gossipy account of the politics of Wall Street “reform” is amusing, and I do believe that he is accurately reporting the Street’s disenchantment with the Chosen One. I’d say where those bankers were clueless was back in 2008 when they allowed image, demeanor, and style to persuade them to believe that ideas and political polarities don’t really matter.

The speed and severity of the swing from enchantment to enmity would be difficult to overstate. When Obama was sworn into office, Democrats on Wall Street rejoiced at the ascension of a president in whom they saw many qualities to admire: brains, composure, bi-partisan instincts, an aversion to class-based combat. And many Wall Street Republicans—after witnessing the horror show that constituted John McCain’s response to the financial crisis—quietly admitted relief that the other guy had prevailed.

Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as “hostile to business,” “anti-wealth,” and “anti-capitalism”; as a “redistributionist,” a “vilifier,” and a “thug.” A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a “Chicago mob guy.” Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. “Oh, not everybody—just most of them,” he replied. “Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.” …

At Goldman and elsewhere, the belief is strong that the case against Wall Street’s most storied firm was politically motivated; lately, Blankfein has taken to trashing Obama to his friends in unusually brutal personal terms. Dimon—who is fond of declaring, “I’m a patriot!” in meetings with White House officials—recently described himself publicly as “a wavering Democrat.”

And even those less bruised than them have found the experience traumatizing. “They’re not accustomed to being engaged in politics this way,” says a private-equity investor. “Their skin isn’t toughened. They actually take [the attacks by Obama] personally. This is a profession with a lot of smart people, but who aren’t necessarily terribly introspective. They think they actually deserve to make all this money. So any attack on their livelihood is, ahem, unpleasant.”

Maybe it was inevitable that the dewy-eyed affair between Wall Street and the White House would so quickly and nastily come a cropper. For more than 30 years, the approach of every administration to the financial industry has been either laissez-faire or actively deregulatory. On the left, much blame is placed at the feet of Clinton, Rubin and his then-deputy, Summers, but in truth they were merely part of a continuum that stretched back to Jimmy Carter. Considering how close the financial system came in 2008 to Armageddon, the consensus for imposing new rules and greater order was nearly universal (among the sane, at least). Yet that does little to lessen the sense of shock—of violation, really—that Wall Street feels. …

There are those who reckon that, what with the wailing and gnashing among both the plutocrats and the populists, Obama has actually found the political sweet spot. “Main Street is mad at the president because he’s too close to Wall Street, and Wall Street is mad at him because he’s too populist,” Altman says. “Therefore, almost by definition, he’s in the right place.”

Yet the political and financial implications of the rift between Obama and Wall Street may be significant. Already, Goldman, JPMorgan, UBS, and many other financial-services firms are shifting their contributions toward the GOP. Not long ago, a big-time Obama Wall Street fund-raiser asked his go-to guy at one of the megabanks that had lavishly supported the candidate in 2008 what level of donations the president might expect from the firm’s people in 2012. The answer was less than a tenth of the previous total.

Gallup is reporting Obama’s job approval rating at 44%.

The White House is admitting offering three jobs to Andrew Romanoff to persuade him not to run in Colorado.

Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett have been subpoenaed to testify in the Blagojevich corruption trial.

Peter Ferrara is now predicting that Barack Hussein Obama will be forced to resign in disgrace.

Oh no! That means that idiot Biden would become president.

Months ago, I predicted in this column that President Obama would so discredit himself in office that he wouldn’t even be on the ballot in 2012, let alone have a prayer of being reelected. Like President Johnson in 1968, who had won a much bigger victory four years previously than Obama did in 2008, President Obama will be so politically defunct by 2012 that he won’t even try to run for reelection.

I am now ready to predict that President Obama will not even make it that far. I predict that he will resign in discredited disgrace before the fall of 2012.

I can’t see it myself. A president would only resign if he were facing certain impeachment. Why would Republicans be willing to impeach Obama? The impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired on Republicans, and they are unlikely to want to repeat that experience. There is no reason for anyone to prefer Biden to Obama. And Obama shows every sign of continuing the same policies and patterns of behavior which have so devastated his party’s and his own political standing. He is a dead albatross hanging from the socialist party’s neck. Let them keep wearing him.

Michael Barone associates Obama’s political methodology with the aberrant and pathological political culture of his adopted city and argues that the politics of Chicago cannot be successfully implemented on a national level.

An interesting thing about Barack Obama is that he chose, on two occasions, to live in Chicago — even though he didn’t grow up there, had no family ties there, never went to school there.

It was a curious choice. Chicago has a civic culture all its own and one that is particularly insular. Family ties and personal connections are hugely important. Professionals who have lived and worked there for a quarter-century are brusquely reminded, “You’re not from here.”

Nonetheless Obama moved upward in the Chicago civic firmament with apparent ease. The community organizer joined the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church in search of street credibility in the heavily black South Side. The adjunct law teacher made friends around the University of Chicago from libertarian academics to radical organizer William Ayers. The young state senator designed a new district that included the Loop and the rich folk on the Near North Side.

Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America’s boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation’s railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.

The Mayors Daley have maintained Chicago’s centrality in commerce by building and expanding O’Hare International Airport and by fostering a culture of crony capitalism with the city’s big employers and labor unions. Chicago survived the Depression and recessions to thrive once again. Sure, small businesses and some outfits lacking political connections fell by the wayside. But the system seems to go on forever.

So it’s natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation’s private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder.

Crony capitalism also comes naturally to a Chicago Way president. Use some sweeteners to get the drug companies and the doctors to sign on to the health care plan. If the health insurers start bellyaching, whack them a few times in public to make them go along. Design a financial reform that Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase can live with even while you assail “Wall Street fat cats.”

The big guys will understand that you have to provide the voters with some political theater while you give them what they want. As for the little guys, well, hey, in Chicago we don’t back no loser. …

To some it may seem anomalous that Obama, who began his Chicago career as a Saul Alinsky-type community organizer, should have taken to the Chicago Way. But Alinsky’s brand of community organizing is very Chicagocentric.

It assumes that there will always be a Machine that you can complain about and that if you make a big enough fuss it will have to respond. And that the Machine can always get more plunder from the private sector.

The problem with Obama’s Chicago Way is that Chicago isn’t America. The Chicago Way works locally because there is an America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay for an America run the Chicago Way?

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, is moved by Obama’s handling of the Sestak scandal to see in him a combination of key characteristics of several of his predecessors.

Obama has been compared to Jimmy Carter (in his misguided notions about the world), to Richard Nixon (in his sleazy backroom dealing and lack of transparency) and to LBJ (in his infatuation with government). Unfortunately, it appears that he embodies the worst of three unsuccessful presidents. And like all three, he may manage to drag his party down with him.

I certainly see in him the self-rigteousness combined with pettiness of Jimmy Carter myself. He’s trying to be FDR and LBJ and possibly Vladimir Ulyanov, to boot. But, it’s the Nixon comparison that features the note of incongruity. Obama depicts himself as holier-than-thou, high-minded, and above all that, but the crooked and sleazy Chicago pol keeps peeking through. He may yet wind up wearing Richard Nixon’s hunted look.

“I missed him even before he was gone.” Steve Bodio remembers long-time Audubon magazine editor Les Line, who evidently had a Weatherby cartridge board and a poster of a Smith & Wesson Model 29 in his Manhattan office.

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Progressive Amnesia: James E. Calfee responds to the attacks on Rand Paul for “not understanding” that state coercion of private businesses was necessary to end segregation by pointing out that the system of racial segregation in public accomodations known as “Jim Crow” was not created by the individual decisions of private business owners. It was put into effect by government through a series of laws passed by Progressive era legislators which were then upheld by the Supreme Court.

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NYT: White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race.

18 USC Section 600: Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

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Peggy Noonan:

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

In a characteristic performance, President Obama held another meeting with Republican senators in one more search for the kind of bipartisanship which would consist of Republicans supporting his policies. When Republicans pointed to his own partisanship, Obama became angry and proceeded to scold his opponents.

The Politico:

Senators and other sources inside the meeting described the gathering as “testy” and “direct” — and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) accused Obama of acting two-faced by asking for GOP support on regulatory reform only to push forward with a bill supported mainly by Democrats. Others felt that the meeting may have made already tense relations between the two parties even worse.

“The more he talked, the more he got upset,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said. “He needs to take a valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans and just calm down, and don’t take anything so seriously. If you disagree with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re attacking their motives — and he takes it that way and tends then to lecture and then gets upset.”

There may be doubts about Obama’s American citizenship, but regarding his membership in the self-infatuated liberal elite, there can be no doubt whatsoever. He shares the establishment perspective that there is only one legitimate political position on any issue: its own. If you don’t agree with Obama, if you don’t support his regulatory and redistributionist policies, you are a bad person. If you criticize him, you are in bad faith.

1:05 video CPR instructions (with nice lingerie).

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, though I don’t quite understand why he was interested.

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Woody Allen says it would be nice if Obama could be dictator for a few years.

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Elsewhere the left is getting nervous, a TPM reader speaks of a crisis of legitimacy.

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The New York Times exposes CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s lies about serving in Vietnam. Another noisy state attorney general with a long record of expanding boundaries and innovative litigation winds up in disgrace.

Winslow Homer, Boy Fishing, 1892

Presidential Memorandum, April 16, 2010:

Today… we are losing touch with too many of the places and proud traditions that have helped to make America special. Farms, ranches, forests, and other valuable natural resources are disappearing at an alarming rate. Families are spending less time together enjoying their natural surroundings. Despite our conservation efforts, too many of our fields are becoming fragmented, too many of our rivers and streams are becoming polluted, and we are losing our connection to the parks, wild places, and open spaces we grew up with and cherish. Children, especially, are spending less time outside running and playing, fishing and hunting, and connecting to the outdoors just down the street or outside of town. …

it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Establishment.

(a) There is established the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative (Initiative), to be led by the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and implemented in coordination with the agencies listed in section 2(b) of this memorandum. The Initiative may include the heads of other executive branch departments, agencies, and offices (agencies) as the President may, from time to time, designate.

(b) The goals of the Initiative shall be to:

(i) Reconnect Americans, especially children, to America’s rivers and waterways, landscapes of national significance, ranches, farms and forests, great parks, and coasts and beaches by exploring a variety of efforts, including:

(A) promoting community-based recreation and conservation, including local parks, greenways, beaches, and waterways;

(B) advancing job and volunteer opportunities related to conservation and outdoor recreation; and

(C) supporting existing programs and projects that educate and engage Americans in our history, culture, and natural bounty.

(ii) Build upon State, local, private, and tribal priorities for the conservation of land, water, wildlife, historic, and cultural resources, creating corridors and connectivity across these outdoor spaces, and for enhancing neighborhood parks; and determine how the Federal Government can best advance those priorities through public private partnerships and locally supported conservation strategies.

(iii) Use science-based management practices to restore and protect our lands and waters for future generations.

Barack Obama thinks America’s children are not hunting and fishing enough? And there’s going to be a federal initiative to do various things about this?

Visions of federally-grant-funded programs hiring aging boffers to take a boy fishing swim before my eyes. I should get one of those How-To-Write-Federal-Grant-Proposals books and start a corporation, rather like ACORN, which would recruit the kinds of individuals my mother used to refer to uncomplimentarily as “woods rats,” the kind of guys who’d rather fish and hunt and drink than work, and sign them on board to take under-Field-Sports-privileged youths out bluegill fishing and bunny shooting. I know some of just the bars to look for my first staffers in.

The idea of a democrat administration ponying up to pay for the gasoline, live bait, cartridges, (and beer) required to expose America’s youth to the out-of-doors is wonderfully amusing.

Hat tip to Peter Wilson via the News Junkie

An unnamed public official

Mark Brown, at the Chicago Sun-Times, is very amused by the determined efforts of the District Judge to keep a certain unnamed public official from having to testify in the trial of Rod Blagojevich

[A] three-paragraph letter that they say was turned over to the defense by prosecutors during a recent closed-door session in the governor’s chambers, laying out new information that convicted political insider Tony Rezko allegedly has told investigators, particularly this: that Rezko said he “believed he transmitted a quid pro quo offer from a lobbyist to the public official, whereby the lobbyist would hold fund-raiser for the official in exchange for favorable official action, but that the public official rejected the offer.”

It also said the public official “denies any such conversation.”

Without flat-out naming Obama as that public official, the governor’s lawyers did everything but draw us a picture, saying Obama “is the only one who can testify as to the veracity” of Rezko’s allegations.

In other words, they’re saying Rezko reported trying to bribe Obama, and that while Rezko said Obama turned him down, Obama said it never happened.

Even if the prosecution avoids using testimony from Antoin Rezko in order to avoid deposing that particular unnamed public official, the Blagojevich defense may yet succeed in dragging Obama into the mess to testify about his own role in the negotiations over Blagojevich’s appointment of a successor to Obama’s seat in the Senate.

According to Blagojevich:

On the day before he was elected president, then-Sen. Obama personally called a union official about his desire for Blagojevich to appoint Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to replace him in the Senate, according to Blagojevich’s defense filing in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

Santa Clara Law School Professor Steve Diamond, who is no conservative, seems to have found a witness able to establish a relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers going back to the mid-1980s.

Barack Obama visited the house of Tom and Mary Ayers, parents of former Weather Underground activist turned education professor Bill Ayers, in the mid-1980s to thank the Ayers’ for their support of his education, according to Allen Hulton, the letter carrier who delivered mail to the Ayers’ Glen Ellyn home at that time. Glen Ellyn is a suburb of Chicago, southwest of the city. …

At the time of their encounter, Hulton recalls, Obama “looked about 19 years old” but was probably in his early 20s. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and moved to Chicago in 1985 at age 24 or 25 to head up the DCP, a fledgling community organization modeled after similar groups started by Saul Alinsky, on the south side of Chicago. The DCP had secured a grant from the Woods Fund, endowed by the Woods family, to finance the hiring of Obama.

The Woods family owned Sahara Coal Company, which supplied coal to utility companies in the Midwest possibly including Commonwealth Edison. Tom Ayers was Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison from 1973 until 1980. Ayers died in June of 2007 at the age of 92 in Hyde Park where he had been living with his son Bill and Dohrn.

“Mrs. Ayers told me that her family had been helping out a brilliant young black man,” Hulton said and whom he believes she said was from Kenya. Hulton said that over the period of six to ten years that he delivered mail to the Ayers home he had numerous conversations with Mrs. Ayers, one conversation with Thomas Ayers and several brief encounters with Bernardine Dohrn who he said lived at the home for several months at one point in time. He never met or saw Bill Ayers at the home. …

One day Hulton found himself on the sidewalk outside the Ayers home at 199 N. Montclair Avenue near the corner of Revere Road just after he had delivered the mail. The house was “very nice and attractive and more expensive than some in Glen Ellyn because it was closer to downtown, but it did not stand out among the houses on that block.” He said the largest and most expensive homes were actually on Revere, around the corner from the Ayers’ home.

As Hulton was on the sidewalk walking away from the Ayers house a tall and thin young black man was coming up the same sidewalk towards the Ayers house.

Hulton recalls that Obama said hello and introduced himself and stopped to chat with him in front of the Ayers house. “I recall that his ears stuck out a little bit. He was more gaunt then than he appears now. His name was an unusual one and when I saw his photo during the campaign it brought back my memory of the event,” Hulton said.

Mr. Obama explained that he had taken the train out from Chicago to visit the Ayers’ in order to thank them for their help with his “education.” At this time, Mr. Obama had recently graduated from Columbia and would soon enter Harvard Law School. Hulton and Obama “spoke for a few minutes, first chatting about the Ayers family,” Hulton said. Hulton said he did not learn whether the help Obama received from the Ayers’ was financial or in some other form. …

Mr. Hulton recalls that he probably asked what Mr. Obama was studying in school and at one point Mr. Obama said that he intended to become President of the United States. Mr. Hulton said he was “taken aback” by the statement but recalls that he did not think Mr. Obama was “arrogant, but just self assured and a person with a lot of self confidence.” “It was not said with hubris,” Hulton recalled, “but with an air of self-assuredness.”

“I told him there was no reason why he couldn’t become president,” Hulton recalled. Obama was dressed “nicely but casually, a slacks and shirt, not jeans and a t-shirt, but definitely not a coat or tie,” he said. After the brief conversation Hulton continued on his route and did not turn back to see whether the Ayers’ were at home or whether Obama entered their house.

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Ed Morrissey describes a new book, The Manchurian President by Aaron Klein, which has even more to say about Barack Obama’s radical associations.

Vera Baker, alleged mistress of the president

The National Enquirer cannot write grammatically, but it has been correct before about the scandalous love lives of prominent democrats (like John Edwards), so its contention that Barack Obama at some unspecified date spent the night at Washington, D.C.’s Hotel George with his 2004 Senate campaign Finance Director may possibly be true.

I don’t understand why the president would be staying at a Washington hotel overnight. He does actually have a residence elsewhere in that city. But the Hotel George is trendy and advertises itself as an eco-friendly, “green” boutique hotel with “a progressive approach to the well-being of our guests and planet” and is certainly just the kind of place Barack Obama would patronize.

Proof of a hot black mistress must be a little disappointing, I expect, to anyone who bought in to the gay sex and drugs rumors that swirled around Barack Obama during the 2008 Presidential Campaign. (Those rumors came from a petty criminal named Larry Sinclair who was anything but a credible source.)

Remember Barack Obama’s campaign promises about an open and complete public debate “on C-Span” when, after his election, he would proceed to try to enact health care reform?

Obama promised openness and “an honest process.” In reality, the bill was drafted by powerful democrat politicians behind closed doors, rammed into law via a series of shady political shortcuts around normal legislative rules, and the release of the results of an analysis by the government’s own economic experts deliberately delayed in order to conceal the truth from the public.

Washington Prowler:

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”