NEW YORK — In a sign of their increased determination to shape both the national debate and the future of the Democratic Party, top liberals are coalescing around a campaign to derail President Barack Obama’s nominee of a top Wall Street investment banker for a senior administration job, setting up a showdown with moderates of their own party.

The campaign against Obama’s nomination of Lazard banker Antonio Weiss to be undersecretary of Treasury for domestic finance gained more traction on Tuesday as a national progressive group announced it had gathered 100,000 signatures on a petition opposing Weiss. But the campaign is about much more than who fills the relatively obscure No. 3 post at Treasury in the closing years of the Obama administration.


Instead, it is a proxy fight in the larger war between the progressive left, led by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and more centrist, Wall Street-friendly Democrats who thrived in the Bill Clinton era but now find themselves in retreat. The fight over Wall Street complicates the potential presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who represented New York in the Senate and has many supporters in financial services. The Democratic rift is in many respects a mirror image of the fight on the right between establishment Republicans who remain close to the banking industry and pine for a Jeb Bush candidacy and conservative populists who rail against the ills of Wall Street and gravitate toward Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul.

“This is not at all about Antonio Weiss,” said Steve Rattner, a prominent investment banker who worked on the auto industry bailout during Obama’s first term. “It is part of a much broader narrative of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party and whether so-called progressives are going to capture that or whether more mainstream Democrats, who are equally progressive in their own way, are going to retain it.” Rattner added that if the Weiss nomination goes down, “it will be a long time before anyone else with Wall Street experience volunteers for this kind of job.”

Many in the progressive movement would welcome such an outcome.

People close to Warren also concede that the fight is about much more than Weiss, though they cite specific objections to his record and suitability for the job, notably his work on a merger deal that saw Burger King relocate its corporate headquarters to Canada and lower its tax bill. But more broadly, Warren and other progressives say the Obama administration continues to send up too many Wall Street-friendly nominees for top economic and regulatory jobs while refusing to listen to possible alternatives with regulatory backgrounds and more consumer-friendly approaches.

Warren backers note that the senator supported other Obama nominees with Wall Street experience, including Stanley Fischer, a former Citigroup executive, as vice chairman of the Fed. And they say she decided to pick big a fight over Weiss in part because other attempts to influence the administration on nominations failed.

“The administration never reached out to her,” a Warren aide said of the decision to tap Weiss. “They don’t ask for her opinion and they don’t listen to her advice” on nominations. People close to the administration fire back that Warren never put forward any other candidates for the Treasury job.

The campaign against Weiss, a widely admired young Wall Street banker who quickly rose to the top ranks at Lazard, began when Warren signaled last month in POLITICO that she would vote against the nomination. Warren then wrote an op-ed in The Huffington Post arguing that “neither [Weiss’s] background nor his professional experience makes him qualified to oversee consumer protection and domestic regulatory functions at the Treasury.”

Warren’s opposition quickly raised the profile of the nomination and ignited progressives hungry for a fresh fight in their campaign to nudge the party away from the kind of deep connections to Wall Street that were prominent in the Clinton administration. Progressives rallied against former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Obama’s first choice for Fed chairman, in favor of Janet Yellen. And in Weiss they saw a new front to continue their advance.

Thus far, the administration is showing no inclination to back off the Weiss nomination with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and White House adviser John Podesta voicing strong support in recent days. “Antonio Weiss is a highly qualified nominee and we look forward to the Senate’s consideration of his nomination and swift confirmation,” White House spokesperson Jennifer Friedman said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

Treasury officials and other Weiss supporters note the Lazard banker’s long background supporting progressive tax policy, including co-authorship of a Center for American Progress report on the topic. They also note that he is publisher of the literary journal Paris Review and was a prodigious fundraiser for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. Around Wall Street, Weiss is considered a left-leaning Democrat who would line up pretty closely with most of Sen. Warren’s views on tax and regulatory policy.

“He has truly progressive values and completely supports the financial reform agenda of the president,” said Gene Sperling, a former top Obama economic adviser who has often served as a bridge between progressive and centrist Democrats. “And his background and knowledge will be helpful in ensuring that reforms designed to help small businesses and families are not subverted or circumvented by Wall Street manipulation that generalist policymakers might not see coming.”

But progressive groups are rejecting these arguments and voicing increasing opposition to Weiss’ nomination.

Progressive group CREDO said Tuesday that over 100,000 people have already signed a petition urging senators of both parties to oppose Weiss. “This is one of those classic moments where you don’t find the divide in Congress is between Democrats and Republicans but between those loyal to Wall Street and those loyal to Main Street,” said Becky Bond, political director of CREDO. “We don’t think it’s too much to ask to have someone in this job who will be the best regulator, not someone who will make Wall Street banks the most comfortable.”

Progressive group Moveon.org also has a petition drive opposing Weiss. The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor group, recently raised questions about millions of dollars in accelerated compensation Weiss will receive if he leaves Lazard for Treasury. And the Independent Community Bankers of America sent a letter to top senators questioning whether Weiss would do enough to champion the interests of smaller banks, underscoring the breadth of populist opposition to the nomination.

So far, only Warren and Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have formally announced their opposition to Weiss. But people close to Warren expect the numbers to grow in the coming days and the Massachusetts senator has no plans to back off her aggressive opposition. Sen. Sherrod Brown, who has a seat on the Finance Committee that will consider Weiss’ nomination and who opposed the nomination of SEC Chair Mary Jo White because of her Wall Street connections, said he will meet one on one with Weiss next week. Brown said that he will decide whether to support the nomination after that meeting.

The nomination is likely to wait until the next Congress when Republicans control the Senate, so Weiss could conceivably be confirmed with mostly Republican support. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the likely incoming chairman of Senate Finance, said Weiss, Lazard’s global head of investment banking, has “a lot of experience, a lot of ability” and an “attractive résumé.” But the GOP could also decide to allow Democrats to keep fighting among themselves over Weiss and delay a confirmation vote for months. Weiss declined to comment citing pending confirmation hearings.

Supporters of Weiss strongly reject all of Warren’s critiques, arguing that the Burger King deal Weiss worked on while at Lazard was not an “inversion” transaction but rather a traditional merger with Canadian doughnut chain Tim Horton’s, motivated entirely by normal businesses purposes. It included an official reorganization in lower-tax Canada because Tim Horton’s is the bigger of the two companies by revenue, these people say. Lew recently announced measures to try to crack down on true inversions, which are done only to reduce a company’s U.S. tax burden, but said he does not believe the Burger King deal fits the criteria.

Weiss’ many supporters on Wall Street argue that the domestic finance job at Treasury includes managing the nation’s $18 trillion in debt, requiring someone with market expertise who can help prevent big spikes in borrowing costs that could hit consumers and businesses alike. But people close to Warren strongly reject this argument and say that there are many people with experience in markets who could handle the job who have a deeper background in financial regulation. They also say Weiss’ credentials as a progressive are thin and that they have no reason to believe he would be a tough Wall Street regulator.

Wall Street executives, meanwhile, worry about much more than just Weiss.

They fear the kind of financial industry expertise welcomed by Bill Clinton, who brought in Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin as Treasury secretary, among others from the industry, is now increasingly vilified by progressives. The question of Wall Street connections has also plagued Hillary Clinton, who has come in for heavy criticism from the left over her well-paid speeches to financial groups including Goldman Sachs. Clinton has struggled trying to connect with the Warren wing of the party, awkwardly suggesting at a rally in October that businesses and corporations don’t create jobs. She later walked back the remark.

Clinton so far has no significant opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, should she run for it. But she is likely to face some sort of challenge from the left. And she could be vulnerable to a populist Republican in the general election or see progressives stay home if she can’t convince them she is strong on their issues.

In addition to losing personal influence, Wall Street Democrats fear the party will lose touch with how economic policymaking will impact markets and businesses, a hallmark of the booming Clinton years. “I think Antonio is perfectly qualified for this job and is exactly the kind of person you want in this job. He knows markets and finance and is a progressive,” Rattner said of the nomination. “The government should have all kinds of different people with different kinds of experience. And that includes people with experience in financial markets.”