Is there a difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ love affair with Wall Street?  According to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the right-wing effort to portray Obama as a crony for big business is “sowing confusion” and rank with hypocrisy. Citing the efforts of Mitt Romney’s Super PAC and an outfit called The American Future Fund to undermine Obama’s “populist message” by painting him as one of Wall Street’s biggest allies, Sargent has this to say about both: You can see one of the key reasons these outside groups exist: They can spend huge sums of money on ads that are truly amazing in their up-is-downism — ones that are designed to do nothing more than blur lines, muddy waters, and sow confusion — even as their chief beneficiaries avoid any accountability for their absurdity. The hypocrisy charge is certainly on point, but is Obama really a thorn in the side of Wall Street? Not even close, as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has long revealed. Here’s Carney’s report from an Obama fundraiser in 2011, written long after the passage of Dodd-Frank, the supposed bane of Wall Street. Note the long list of Wall Street donors and this telling quote from Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: “We will be among the biggest beneficiaries of reform.” But maybe hypocrisy is less important than effective hypocrisy management, and anything that hurts Obama will inevitably help Republicans. If that’s where Sargent is coming from, it’s understandable that he’d want to avoid, as he puts it, “blurring the lines.”
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Is there a difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ love affair with Wall Street?


 According to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the right-wing effort to portray Obama as a crony for big business is “sowing confusion” and rank with hypocrisy. Citing the efforts of Mitt Romney’s Super PAC and an outfit called The American Future Fund to undermine Obama’s “populist message” by painting him as one of Wall Street’s biggest allies, Sargent has this to say about both:

You can see one of the key reasons these outside groups exist: They can spend huge sums of money on ads that are truly amazing in their up-is-downism — ones that are designed to do nothing more than blur lines, muddy waters, and sow confusion — even as their chief beneficiaries avoid any accountability for their absurdity.
The hypocrisy charge is certainly on point, but is Obama really a thorn in the side of Wall Street? Not even close, as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has long revealed. Here’s Carney’s report from an Obama fundraiser in 2011, written long after the passage of Dodd-Frank, the supposed bane of Wall Street. Note the long list of Wall Street donors and this telling quote from Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: “We will be among the biggest beneficiaries of reform.” But maybe hypocrisy is less important than effective hypocrisy management, and anything that hurts Obama will inevitably help Republicans. If that’s where Sargent is coming from, it’s understandable that he’d want to avoid, as he puts it, “blurring the lines.”

Source: topix.com