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of others.” (A few months later, around the holidays, Loeb sent an e-mail to several other Obama bundlers that started “Dear Friends/battered wives” and suggested that the book He’s Just Not That Into You would make an apt stocking stuffer.) At a private White House lunch, Dimon pulled a prepared speech from his pocket and admonished Obama for undermining business confidence. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was even starchier, telling friends, “These people are like the Chicago mob.”
    The Wall Streeters still loyal to Obama were concerned that all the bellowing would affect his ability to raise money among their peers. One nightin New York, after listening to Blankfein and some other bankers trashing the president, Orin Kramer ran into Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson. Kramer was a storied bundler, having raised millions for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Obama. He knew the score.
    “I was just with some people who have been supportive, financial types, and they sound kinda negative,” Kramer said. “Should I care?”
    “No,” Benenson replied. “Money is never going to be a problem for Obama.”
    Obama’s own attitude toward fund-raising struck his Wall Street supporters as equally blithe. When he wasn’t bashing them in the nose, he was giving them the back of his hand. The stories of his aloofness and inattentiveness to his donors were legion. Of the first White House Christmas party, in 2009, when Obama declined to take photos with them and their families. (“Big deal,” he said to Rouse. “They’ve all got pictures with me before.”) Of the $30,000-a-plate dinner at the Four Seasons in 2010, at which Obama, after devoting a brisk seven minutes to each table, retreated to a private room to sup with Jarrett and his body man, Reggie Love—a tale that traveled so widely it became a sort of urban legend.
    What made Obama’s behavior come across all the shabbier was the unavoidable comparison with Bill Clinton, who intuitively grasped the neediness of the deep-pocketed—and fed it, massaged it, manipulated it. He listened (or pretended to). He made them feel esteemed. Anyone hosting a fund-raiser for 42 would get a personal thank-you call, a handwritten letter, a signed picture. For the eight years of Clinton, Wall Street Democrats had been solicited, served, and serviced by the master of donor maintenance. For the first two years of Obama’s reign, they got . . . squat.
    Obama’s reaction to Wall Street’s displeasure was acute indifference tinged with exasperation. On substance, he hadn’t an ounce of sympathy for the plaints of the bankers. Not only had he resisted the calls to nationalize the banks, but his White House had helped thwart the proposals of some in his party to break them up. He had left the bankers’ bonuses alone, incurring the wrath of the left. Sure, he had tossed brickbats at the fat cats. So what? You folks are too sensitive, you need to get over yourselves, he told his Wall Street friends. “I can take a punch,” Obama said. “Why can’t you guys take a punch?”
    When it came to the whining about the lack of stroking and schmoozing, he shrugged. Obama had never courted donors. He had worked his tail off at fund-raising in 2008, but he hadn’t toadied—and the money cascaded in. There was something inside him that made him recoil from even the faintest hint of political or personal indebtedness. If the Wall Streeters wanted to punish him for his policies, so be it. If they wanted him to kiss their behinds, to hell with that.
    Obama was unwilling or unable to change his ways even when he needed to hook the most titanic financial fish—George Soros. Soros, of course, was a billionaire hedge-fund operator and philanthropist whose avid liberal leanings had led him to spend lavishly in campaigns past, including $27.5 million through an outside group in 2004. In the 2008 campaign, Obama’s introduction to Wall Street took place in Soros’s Manhattan