VII: The Hope Pope and his Trilateral Money Machine 285“What does he really stand for? He’s a patriot - he’s a friend of mine and a really decent guy -
but he’s unpredictable. “[He] doesn’t know much about the economy and - I say this
sympathetically - I think he has a lot of problems.” (London Guardian, May 30, 2008)
In July, billionaire oligarch Warren Buffett participated in Obama’s meeting of economists and
financiers along with Paul Adolph Volcker, Robert Rubin, and a few token labor leaders. Now,
there could be no doubt whatsoever that Obama was indeed the consensus candidate of the Wall
Street financier establishment and its British cousins. This provided thinking persons with the most
powerful motivation to mobilize against Obama.
THE OBAMA MONEY MACHINE SPUTTERS, JULY 2008
Yet, Obama’s path to financial supremacy was not quite that simple. Senator Clinton had
mobilized significant numbers of wealthy contributors. Many of these persons of considerable
means had been thoroughly antagonized by the scurrilous sexism and misogyny of the Obama
campaign. But, his vision clouded by his own rising megalomania, Obama assumed that at the end
of the primary season, these traditional Democratic Party financial backers would fall into line and
filled his coffers for the fall. A key turning point was a meeting for Democratic fatcats at the
Mayflower Hotel on K Street in Washington, where Obama held forth behind closed doors before a
group of deeply suspicious Hillary backers. Accounts of what had gone on in this tense and heated
meeting filtered out only gradually through the media:
“I would say he was pretty underwhelming,” a longtime Democratic activist said several days
after he and some 200 other big-money supporters of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential
campaign met with the victor, Barack Obama, in Washington on June 26. ... the tone of what
really happened inside the locked ballroom was quite different once Obama and Hillary Clinton
had their cordial say and the floor was opened for questions. The first “questioner,” an angry
woman from New York, demanded a roll call of presidential preference at the Denver
convention. Next came another distraught woman who declared that Clinton’s candidacy was
the victim of “misogyny.” One participant told me, “This is as tough a crowd as Obama is going
to face the whole campaign.” But, in the opinion of the Clintonites, he did not open the door to
his campaign, because he asked nothing of them. Big-money Democrats who could have
expected to be named U.S. ambassadors by a President Hillary Clinton realized that they would
get nothing from a President Obama. The train had left the station, and they were not aboard.^135
Any machine pol knew that patronage handouts could be used to cement an effective political
apparatus, but Obama apparently had not even learned that.
SNOBBISH, ARROGANT, AND BORING: OBAMA DEMANDS TRIBUTE
Obama had promised a new politics of hope and change, but in practice he was delivering a bitter
and vindictive rebuff to Hillary’s supporters. The megalomania exhibited in an earlier stage in the
infamous Joshua speech was now taking over more and more of the Perfect Master’s personality,
causing him to commit stupid and easily avoidable political blunders. Here is another insider
account of Obama’s wretched performance at this critical meeting:
‘Hillary, ever the good trooper and team player, gave Barack an intro to her big dollar donors
and an opportunity to start the healing. But Barack continues to play the role of petulant bore.
He gave an uninspired, mechanical speech. The charm exhibited on the campaign trail that left
women swooning, was missing in action. Folks from the Hillary camp described the speech as