Read Double Down: Game Change 2012 for Free Online Page A

Obama’s reelection operation into a colossus, as innovative as Google and as juggernautish as Exxon Mobil. For its headquarters he rented the sixth floor of One Prudential Plaza, a towering high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan, filling it with 160 staffers by late June. To reenlist Obama’s grassroots army from 2008, he had already opened sixty field offices in thirty-nine states and was upgrading the campaign’s high-tech tools and infrastructure for the age of Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest.
    What Messina was doing most urgently was meeting with donors—all the time, all over the place. North of $750 million would be required to repel the coming Republican onslaught, he told anyone who would listen, although in truth his goal was more like $1 billion. (After all, Obama had rustled up $748 million the last time around.) To hit that target, Obama would need to work the circuit tirelessly for eighteen months. He would need to tap Hollywood, Silicon Valley, trial lawyers, and labor. But most of all, he would need to milk Wall Street for millions—because, to borrow from Willie Sutton, the Street was where the money was.
    In 2008, Obama had done precisely that. Though the importance of the Web and small donors to the money machine that the Obamans built was often and rightly noted, the role of Gotham’s financial elite was impossible to overstate. By Election Day, three of the top seven institutions bundling donations to him were New York megabanks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, with UBS AG and Morgan Stanley further down in the top twenty.
    In the course of collecting the bankers’ checks, Obama began consulting several of them as informal advisers, notably JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and UBS Americas CEO Robert Wolf. He nursed a network of hedge-fund and private-equity admirers, such as Boston Provident’s Orin Kramer, Avenue Capital’s Marc Lasry, and Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. When the lords of finance gazed at Obama, they saw a version of themselves: a product of the meritocratic elite, a self-made Ivy Leaguer, a hyper-rational sophisticate transcending the hoary dogmas and histrionics of conventional partypolitics. Dimon was so smitten that he spent three days in Washington with his family during the inauguration. It all smacked of puppy love.
    But once Obama took office, the romance went south fast. Like many other businessfolk, the Wall Streeters disparaged Obama’s team for lacking anyone with a meaningful background in the private sector. When Jarrett would huff, “Well, I have one,” they rolled their eyes; they considered her a political hack, ineffectual and entitled. Axelrod they saw as a combination of Trotsky and Rasputin, spouting class warfare on TV. Larry Summers and Tim Geithner they derided as gormless eggheads. “They’re smart,” remarked one hedge-fund hotshot, “but you’d never, like, let them run a business for you.”
    Even more than they disdained Obama’s people, the Wall Streeters hated his policies. And not so much the Dodd-Frank reregulation as his proposals to raise taxes on “carried interest” (the main source of income for private-equity pooh-bahs) and on the sale of hedge funds. But above all, they despised what they perceived as Obama’s hostile tone: his attacks on the financiers who resisted the terms of the administration’s plan to rescue Chrysler as a “small group of speculators . . . who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices,” his inveighing on 60 Minutes against “fat-cat bankers,” his lecturing them piously that he was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
    By the middle of 2010, many of Obama’s Wall Street friends were heaping scorn on him behind his back and to his face. In a letter to his investors that August, Loeb, who had raised $200,000 for Obama in 2008, accused the administration of attempting to “fracture the populace by pulling capital and power from the hands of some and putting it in the hands