The president has bounced between embracing the business community and vilifying it. Obama at war with self over Wall St.

First, the White House signaled it would make anger toward Wall Street central to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. But then, Obama warned against demonizing all of Wall Street — only a few days before he sympathized with the Occupy Wall Street protesters who do exactly that.

And that’s just what the president and his team have said since Saturday.


The White House’s Wall Street whiplash stretches to the earliest days of the administration, with Obama conciliatory one minute and confrontational the next.

His zigzags between embracing the business community and vilifying it have shadowed his presidency, exposing him to charges from Wall Street that he’s out to get them and from liberals that he coddles Big Business. Based on his own statements, Obama himself can appear undecided about which way to go — an incoherence that has left both sides dissatisfied as he seeks reelection.

Three years into power, Obama’s message du jour pattern seems more consequential than merely clumsy communications. It speaks to a difficulty setting a clear strategy that by some lights has been central to his political challenges.

“In some ways, he’s lost both sides,” said Robert Reich, labor secretary in the Clinton administration and public policy professor at the University of California-Berkeley. “The business community, especially Wall Street, has concluded he is against them even though this administration has been one of the most business friendly in history. At the same time, a large portion of the Democratic base doesn’t think he has been tough enough on Big Business and Wall Street.”

“It leaves him vulnerable, particularly if unemployment doesn’t drop substantially,” Reich added.

Obama capped the first year of his presidency by deriding Wall Street titans as “fat-cat bankers” lapping up obscene bonuses, only to say later that he doesn’t “begrudge” the multimillion-dollar payouts. He tried to hit the reset button with business after the 2010 midterm elections, plucking a new chief of staff from the banking industry, summoning 20 CEOs to a five-hour makeup session and telling the Chamber of Commerce that “we have to do this together.”

But with the political winds shifting once again, Obama is edging back into pitchfork mode, assailing Bank of America for a $5 monthly debit-card fee and expressing solidarity with Wall Street protesters.

His bus tour this week through Virginia and North Carolina featured a new attack on Republicans and Wall Street for trying to gut the financial regulatory overhaul law.

“It turns out the Republican [jobs] plan boils down to a few basic ideas: They want to gut regulations; They want to let Wall Street do whatever it wants,” Obama said Monday in Asheville, N.C. “Their plan says we should go back to the good old days before the financial crisis when Wall Street was writing its own rules. They want to roll back all the reforms that we’ve put into place.”

The latest shift hasn’t gone unnoticed on Wall Street or within Washington’s business lobby, sparking a fresh round of frustration that the White House had reverted to its old ways.

“We are disappointed in the attack position of the administration,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at The Financial Services Roundtable, which represents financial firms.

White House aides acknowledge a complex relationship, given the problems he inherited, but not an inconsistency on the president’s part.

He’s needed to spur the private sector to get off the sidelines and begin hiring but also to hold Wall Street accountable for its actions during the financial crisis. He’s done plenty over the past three years that business supports — education initiatives, the auto industry bailout, free-trade agreements, tax cuts, transportation funding — and many other things it opposes. He takes the financial sector to task when it deserves that and tries to find common ground when it is possible, aides say.

“The president has made it a priority to promote policies to encourage the private sector to grow and hire — including adopting suggestions from the business leaders serving on his Jobs Council,” said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, in a statement.

“While there are many policies on which we agree, there are some important areas of disagreement,” she said. “For one, the president made it a priority to pass the strongest consumer protections in history, and many on Wall Street and their lobbyists spent millions to try to defeat them. The president will continue to speak out forcefully for why we need to rein in excessive abuses by some on Wall Street and put these rules of the road in place to help American consumers and strengthen our economy.”

The most effective modern presidents have had a theory of the case — in which policy and politics work in tandem, one reinforcing the other.

Some Democrats would advise Obama to channel Franklin D. Roosevelt, who assailed financial interests and promised that under him “the forces of selfishness and lust for power” would meet “their match” and ultimately “their master.” Others would suggest Obama follow Bill Clinton, who adopted a more welcoming stance and argued that Americans prosper when business and government work together.

But there aren’t many Democrats who would advise Obama to alternate between Roosevelt and Clinton.

Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Obama should be able to push for tax cuts, pass free-trade agreements, create a jobs council — and still take on elements of Wall Street — without being tagged as hot and cold.

“Watching that from the outside, I don’t find such an approach confusing,” Goolsbee said. “I think it’s fully consistent with being for a broad-based growth plan.”

Yet other former aides describe a split-personality administration, particularly in the first two years of the Obama presidency. The political hands pushed for Obama to appear in sync with the retributive mood toward Wall Street, a bloodlust strongest among the Democratic base. But the actual policies under debate rarely matched the fire-breathing rhetoric.

“There was always something of a tension between the political side and the policy side because on the political side, when all this stuff was going on, saying nice things about the banks was not good politically, for obvious reasons,” said Andrew Metrick, chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. “I imagine the tensions still exist.”

Jeffrey Kindler, the former CEO of Pfizer who worked with the administration on health care reform, recalled meetings with “the policymakers and the Cabinet secretaries and the like where they were almost apologetic about the president’s comments about various industries.”

“There was a disassociation from those comments with the policymakers [who said], ‘That’s just red meat for the base, we don’t really feel that way, the policies are going be different,’ and in fact, they were,” Kindler said at a panel discussion last spring at Yale University about the administration’s relationship with business.

From the perspective of Wall Street, the turn back toward harsher rhetoric means the post-2010 election détente — if there ever really was one — is over, and a new campaign is under way. It remains hard to trust Obama, Wall Street executives say, and many wish the election were this year so they could get some clear direction about the future, preferably from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

“Many of the folks here want to vote for [Obama]. I want to vote for him,” said an executive at one of the country’s largest banks, who is considering voting Republican for president next year for the first time. “But he does just about everything he can to drive us away. I wish he could find more of a consistent balance. I’m just very disappointed in him.”

Obama advisers meet with business leaders, but “nothing ever really changes,” said a top Democratic fundraiser on Wall Street for Obama and Democratic super PACs.

“They say, ‘We want your support,’ and then they turn around and say ‘F—- you,’” the fundraiser said.

The first hint of what both sides describe as a complex relationship came only weeks after Obama arrived in the Oval Office.

As fury spread over more than $165 million in bonuses awarded to AIG executives in March 2009, top economic adviser Larry Summers proclaimed that the administration couldn’t do a thing about it, citing the “sanctity of contracts.” With voters outraged by Summers’s statement, Obama announced a day later that he had ordered Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to use “every single legal avenue” to recover the money.

In his bid to pass his health care overhaul, Obama delighted Democrats during the summer of 2009 by railing against the insurance industry. But at the same time, his top aides were locked in secret negotiations with drugmakers, prompting liberals to question which side of the us-versus-them divide he stood on.

Obama appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in December 2009, as anger raged once again over big bonuses, this time for Goldman Sachs executives — and he hit back hard.

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street,” Obama said. “The people on Wall Street still don’t get it. They don’t get it.”

A month later, he proposed a tax on the 50 biggest banks, declaring “we want our money back” from the 2008 bailout. He threw his support behind the “Volcker rule,” which restricts how large financial firms can make risky bets with their own capital — fiercely opposed by the industry as a major money loser.

Then, in what was interpreted as a 180-degree shift on bonuses, Obama told Bloomberg News in February 2010 that he doesn’t “begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

By the summer, Obama was taking steps to repair the strained relations with a review aimed at easing government regulations.

But as Democrats braced for deep losses in the 2010 midterm elections, the president led an attack on the Chamber of Commerce for alleged ties to foreign donors, deepening the rift with the country’s most powerful business lobby.

After the election, Obama conceded that he had mismanaged the relationship.

“There’s no doubt that the relationship with the business community over the course of the last two years at times has gotten strained,” Obama said. “And, so, I think that we’ve got some repair work to do there.”

Among the numerous efforts at conciliation: Obama met for five hours with 20 leading CEOs at the Blair House in December. He agreed to extend the Bush-era tax cuts. He hired Bill Daley, Midwest chairman of JPMorgan, as chief of staff. He issued an executive order to streamline government regulations. He created the White House jobs council, a panel of 37 top business executives tasked with developing job-growth strategies. He pushed a host of private-public partnerships to stoke job growth and three free-trade agreeements. He halted a controversial Environmental Protection Agency regulation on smog standards.

Darlene Miller, a member of the Jobs Council and the owner and CEO of Permac Industries, a Minnesota precision machining company, said the White House deserves credit for being responsive.

“The administration does have its own policy priorities, and there are things that I and the business community don’t necessarily like,” Miller said. “I have seen the administration respond and take action on many of our recommendations. I do believe that the administration is listening.”

But the latest tactical shift threatens to overshadow the White House’s recent gains, sowing yet more confusion.

During an appearance earlier this month at The Atlantic’s Washington Ideas Forum, Daley joked about the administration’s roller-coaster relationship with the business community.

“It’s going great,” he quipped. “Can’t you tell? I mean, you know things are going really great. The debt ceiling was no problem and the business community loves us, and they love the rhetoric — and, just, no problems.”

Ben White contributed to this report.