By the end of February, the group had raised more than $43 million, almost half of it from Wall Street — more money than Obama raised from the industry during the entire 2008 campaign. Paul Tudor Jones was among the group’s donors, cutting Restore Our Future a $200,000 check in December. At the same time, a super PAC founded by former Obama aides, Priorities USA Action, was struggling, raising less than $5 million, much of it from Hollywood and unions. The Democratic group faced a particularly cold reception among Wall Street Democrats, some of whom feared any money they gave would be used to finance attacks on their own industry.

The huge gulf in super PAC donations terrified the Obama campaign. If they wanted, financiers could pour unlimited money into Restore Our Future, meaning that voters in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania might see nothing but negative ads about the president from September through Election Day. (It’s no wonder that the Obama team has already held more major fund-raisers than George W. Bush did during the entire 2004 campaign.)

Several of the president’s advisers also feared that Wall Street’s anger would radiate into the broader business community, driving the narrative that Obama was anti-business. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the combined financial, real estate and insurance sector has given a higher percentage of its contributions to Republicans this year than it has in any cycle since 1990, the first year the center began collecting and categorizing campaign records. Some in the White House also believed that if Wall Street executives were deeply unhappy with the president, the markets would follow suit.

Further complicating matters was the White House’s well-known aversion to what is known in the fund-raising world as “donor maintenance.” Born as an insurgency against the Democratic establishment, the Obama camp has been criticized for cultivating an aura of disdain for other political and corporate power centers. Efforts to make nice with donors and business leaders — including repeated pilgrimages by White House and campaign aides to New York and other cities — were regarded as, at best, halfhearted. And Obama himself had a reputation for being cold at small gatherings, unwilling to stroke donors or cultivate them as the Clintons had. Now he was asking them to help him raise tens of millions of dollars. One New York-area bundler told me about a conversation she had with a friend who attended an Obama fund-raiser.

“I just don’t think he likes us,” the guest reported back.

In early February, Messina traveled to New York again to meet with 30 or so Obama supporters at the Core Club, a members-only establishment in Midtown that caters to the hedge-fund crowd. In a brief presentation, Messina thanked those who had been supportive, described the campaign’s plans for 2012 and offered his impressions of the president’s likely opponent, Romney. According to several people in the room, he closed with an appeal to the executives for help, asking them to consider signing on as hosts for the small dinner, now scheduled for March 1 (they had just locked in that date). “We want it to be a big success,” Messina told the room.

Mindich, the former Goldman whiz kid, had a question. If Romney were the nominee, Mindich asked, how would the Obama campaign go after him? Would it attack his record at Bain Capital? Would it attack the private-equity industry?