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The favorable elite assessment of Obama began in October of 2003. That’s when “Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate board-member who chaired Bill Clinton’s presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home. That event,” Silverstein noted, “marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual—the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists.” 

Drawing on his undoubted charm, wit, intelligence, and Harvard credentials, Obama passed this trial with shining colors. At a series of social meetings with assorted big “players” from the financial, legal and lobbyist sectors, Obama  impressed key establishment figures like Gregory Craig (a longtime leading attorney and former special counsel to the White House), Mike Williams (the legislative director of the Bond Market Association), Tom Quinn (a partner at the top corporate law firm Venable and a leading Democratic Party “power broker”), and Robert Harmala, another Venable partner and “a big player in Democratic circles.”  

Craig liked the fact that Obama was not a racial “polarizer” on the model of past African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Williams was soothed by Obama’s reassurances that he was not “anti-business” and became “convinced…that the two could work together.”

“There’s a reasonableness about him,” Harmala told Silverstein.  “I don’t see him as being on the liberal fringe.”

By Silverstein’s account, the good “word about Obama spread through Washington’s blue-chip law firms, lobby shops, and political offices, and this accelerated after his win in the March [2004] Democratic primary.”  Elite financial, legal, and lobbyists contributions came into Obama’s coffers at a rapid and accelerating pace [3].

The “good news” for Washington and Wall Street insiders was that Obama’s “star quality” would not be directed against the elite segments of the business class. The interesting black legislator from the South Side of Chicago was “someone the rich and powerful could work with.” According to Obama biographer and Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, in late 2003 and early 2004: 

Word of Obama’s rising star was now spreading beyond Illinois, especially through influential Washington political circles like blue chip law firms, party insiders, lobbying houses.  They were all hearing about this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African American who unbelievably could win votes across color lines…..[his handlers and] influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers all vigorously worked their D.C. contacts to help Obama make the rounds with the Democrats’ set of power brokers. …Obama…spent a couple of days and nights shaking hands making small talk and delivering speeches to liberal groups, national union leaders, lobbyists, fund-raisers and well-heeled money donors.  In setting after setting, Obama’s Harvard Law resume and his reasonable tone impressed the elite crowd

According to Mendell, Obama now cultivated the support of the privileged few by “advocate[ing] fiscal restraint” and “calling for pay-as-you-go government” and “extol[ing] the merits of free trade and charter schools.”  He “moved beyond being an obscure good-government reformer to being a candidate more than palatable to the moneyed and political establishment.” [4].

“Reasonable tone” was code language with a useful translation for Obama’s new business-class backers: “friendly to capitalism and its opulent masters.” 

OBAMA’S “DOLLAR VALUE”

Since his election to the U.S. Senate and through the presidential campaign, the “deeply conservative” (according to New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar) Obama has done nothing to undermine his “palatability” to concentrated economic and political power. He has made his safety to the power elite evident on matters both domestic and global, from his support for bailing out parasitic Wall Street financial firms with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars (while claiming to be “a free market guy” and proclaiming “love” for “capitalism”) to his refusal to question the morality of U.S. colonial wars and his strident support for maintaining a globally unmatched “defense” (empire) budget that accounts for nearly half the world’s military spending. As Edward S. Herman and David Peterson note in an important recent article, “in 2007-08, Obama has placated establishment circles on virtually every front imaginable, the candidate of ‘change we can believe in’ has visited interest group after interest group to promise them that they needn’t fear any change in the way they’re familiar with doing business” [5].

It’s all very consistent with Obama’s history stretching back to his days as the Republican-pleasing editor of the Harvard Law Review and his climb up the corporate-friendly politics of Chicago.  As Ryan Lizza noted in The New Yorker last July, “Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them” [6]. 

Obama’s business-friendly centrism has helped him garner an astonishing, record-setting stash of corporate cash.  He has received more than $33 million from “FIRE,” the finance-real-estate and insurance sector.  His winnings include $824,202 from the leading global investment firm Goldman Sachs [7].  He has been consistently backed by the biggest and most powerful Wall Street firms.

At the same time and by more than mere coincidence, Obama has enjoyed a remarkable windfall of favorable corporate media coverage. That media treatment is the key to Obama’s success in winning support and donations from the middle-class and from non-affluent people like Deddrick Battle.

This does not mean that the Obama phenomenon has raised no concerns among the rich and powerful. As  Herman and Peterson note, “Obama’s race, his background, his enthusiastic, and less predictable constituency, and the occasional slivers of populism that creep into his campaign, make the establishment nervous, whereas Hillary Clinton and John McCain clearly posed no such threat.”

Still, the monied elite’s most reactionary wing has used its formidable media and propaganda system to keep the Obama “movement” safely within conservative boundaries.  It has employed a series of neo-McCarthyite anti-radical and related racial scare tactics including the Jeremiah Wright Affair and subsequent public relations campaigns surrounding alleged Obama links to “terrorist” charter-school advocate William Ayers and “radical professor” Rashid Khalidi.  It has sought to link the openly capitalist Obama to the “anti-American” threat of “socialism,” alleging that that the harbors a nefarious desire to “redistribute” wealth.