Is Greenwich, Conn., Obama Country?
dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com
Considerable amounts of ink and pixels have been devoted lately to characterizing Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the hedge-fund set. A Financial Times article last month quoted an anonymous United States businessman as saying, “The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama” — a reference to Greenwich, Conn., the leafy suburb that many hedge fund managers call home. (That breezy statement turns out to be quite untrue, as we will see later.)
An article on The New Republic’s Web site this week, titled “Money Man,” picks up this theme.
It begins by referring to Mr. Obama’s “playing the role of the ‘grassroots candidate’,” while at the same time taking lots of campaign cash from hedge funds and private-equity firms — “relying on a growing cadre of young, eye-poppingly rich hedge-fund and private-equity managers to keep him at the head of the money primary.”
The larger issue is that managers of hedge funds, which are private pools of capital for institutional and wealthy investors, are feeling their political oats. They have begun taking up lobbying activities, and Washington has turned its attention to the fast-growing industry. As a result, election watchers are eager to know who will win favor with this emerging political force.
To be sure, Mr. Obama has taken considerable sums from hedge fund sources, and he is likely to take more. There are reports that Paul Tudor Jones II, founder of hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, will be hosting a fund raiser for Mr. Obama at his sprawling Greenwich mansion later this month.
Still, Mr. Obama’s competitors have also been busy collecting checks in Greenwich. PoliticalMoneyLine, a Web site that tracks political donations, reports that between January 1 and March 31, the presidential exploratory committee of Hillary Clinton took in $146,050 from 72 donors whose addresses are in Greenwich. The committee of Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, also did well there, getting $117,050 from 62 Greenwich donors during that period. (In fact, Mr. Jones of Tudor Investment was one of Mr. Giuliani’s early contributors.)
And then there is Christopher Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut who also aspires to be the next president. Mr. Dodd’s presidential committee has found plenty of support in Greenwich, raising $152,250 from 86 donors there. This may be because hedge fund managers want to avoid greater regulation of their industry, and they see Mr. Dodd, the head of the Senate Banking Committee, as a valuable ally.
By comparison, Mr. Obama’s committee reported just $80,600 from 42 Greenwich donors in the first three months of the year.
Of course, “Greenwich” is not synonymous with “hedge fund.” Many donors with Greenwich addresses are not hedge fund workers — they may be doctors, lawyers or plumbers.
And there is no question that Wall Street has opened its wallet for Mr. Obama. The New Republic, citing PEHub, reports that Mr. Obama got nearly twice as much cash from employees of private equity firms ($85,350) than Ms. Clinton did. And among all the candidates, he got the most ($479,209) from investment banks. |
