October 16, 2011

The Weekend Interview with Mortimer Zuckerman: The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire - WSJ.com

Strong talk from a highly successful real estate capitalist disenchanted with TeamObama.
"...The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision" in Washington and "desperate for strong leadership." Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor's, he wrote, "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country..."
His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, "there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country." Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, "The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he's not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing." 

Further evidence of Wall Street capitalists' alienation from Obama can be found in this October 15, 2011 NY Times story. Romney has raised far more campaign cash from Wall Street than Obama, a substantial turn-around from the 2008 campaign.

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