Hillary's Wall Street Dilemma: Wall Street Offers Clinton a Thorny Embrace [View all]

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As its relationship with Democrats hits a historic low, Wall Street sees a solution on the horizon: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton was the industry’s home state senator, and the financial sector was the second-largest giver to her presidential campaign in 2008. In her post-State Department life, she has been showered with lucrative speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan and other financial firms. In her talks, she says it is unproductive to vilify the industry, and she avoids the kind of language that puts off financial executives, as when President Obama referred to “fat cat” bankers in 2009.

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“I think there’s a potential window for Democrats to come back, but if it is one wing of the party pushing the populist line — anti-big banks, punishing people whether or not they had anything to do with the crisis — they’ll lock this crowd into a Republican alternative,” said Bill Daley, a former chief of staff to Mr. Obama and commerce secretary under President Bill Clinton who is now a hedge fund executive.

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Few political families are closer to Wall Street than the Clintons. Their family foundation has raised millions from financiers and the foundations of big banks, and recently held its annual briefing for donors in the auditorium of Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in Manhattan. Major financial firms are stocked with Clinton alumni.

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In 2016, said Michael Lux, a political consultant who worked in the Clinton White House, “People are going to be in a surly mood, a populist mood. To have a Democrat too close to Wall Street, raising too much money from them, having a ‘We’re all in this together’ message is a big mistake.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/us/08wallst.html?_r=0