Only 5 days ago, the media bombastically reported that there was a major gap in Wall Street campaign contributions, and that President Obama had lost out to his Republican adversaries. The headline that immediately echoed throughout the media landscape was that Mitt Romney had decisively taken the cake when it came to raking in contributions from the financial sector. The narrative propagated, then, was that Wall Street was fed up with Obama for condemning CEO bonuses and for gently embracing the Occupy Wall Street Protests. For example, a New York Times article noted,
That gap underscores the growing alienation from Mr. Obama among many rank-and-file financial professionals and Mr. Romney’s aggressive and successful efforts to woo them.
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It could widen as Mr. Obama, seeking to harness anger over growing income inequality, escalates his criticism of the industry, after a year spent trying to smooth ties bruised by efforts to impose tougher regulations.
Today, however, the Washington Post took up the issue of Wall Street contributions with a little more depth. Instead of merely looking at campaign contributions in one dimension – that is, cash given directly to the candidate – they decided to expand their analysis to include contributions given to the Democratic National Committee for re-election purposes by individuals in the financial sector. This time around, Obama is at top, beating Romney with double the amount of total Wall Street contributions. Obama is doing so well, in fact, that he is even receiving more money contributions from Romney’s own company, Bain Capital, than Romney is receiving himself:
Obama’s fundraising advantage is clear in the case of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private-equity firm that was co-founded by Romney, and where the Republican made his fortune. Not surprisingly, Romney has strong support at the firm, raking in $34,000 from 18 Bain employees, according to the analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
But Obama has outdone Romney on his own turf, collecting $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he needed only three donors to do it.
The Washington Post has headlined their article, “Obama still flush with cash from financial sector despite frosty relations,” which essentially nullifies the popular media sentiment of less than a week ago that the financial sector was severely punishing Obama. I think it’s safe to assume that the media do not have too firm of a grasp on the campaign fund race nor the effects that Occupy Wall Street will have on national politics. As much as they would like to be the ones to authoritatively paint the 2012 campaign narrative — and as short as our attention spans are to remember that their narrative has no coherency and changes from day to day — they are for the most part just practicing alchemy with predicting cause and effect. They have no clue what’s going on.