Much has been made of the way Barack Obama has changed the sociology of the capital. There’s the shifting locus of social activity from Georgetown to Logan Circle, and the intrusion of two basketball hoops on the White House tennis court. But, even in Obama’s Washington, some of the old status symbols still matter. Take, for instance, the periodic ritual of the state dinner. In advance of such affairs, the most recent of which occurred in May, entrails-readers up and down the Amtrak corridor still scrutinize the guest lists. Invariably, they find hints about who the White House is courting (Chris Dodd, Anthony Kennedy) and who it may be shunning (no Lindsey Graham?). To this day, there’s still nothing like a state dinner sighting to shore up a hobbled official (Janet Napolitano), announce the arrival of an up-and-coming constituency (Univision anchor Jorge Ramos), or vouch for a wise man’s access (Mack McLarty ”¦ ?). The Salahis may be tacky, but fools they were not.
Coming as it did near the climax of the financial-reform fight, the May dinner held particular interest for a certain class of status-conscious gossip: Wall Street executives. Read one way, the guest list functioned as a crude, if not terribly surprising, guide to the administration’s financial-sector allegiances. Topping the list was Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS Americas, a longtime Obama fundraiser and confidant. Wolf was joined by James Gorman of Morgan Stanley, a firm with strong relationships at Treasury and the White House, and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, whose bravery as a reformer Valerie Jarrett recently touted. Conversely, with his firm now shorthand for Wall Street double-dealing, no one should have been shocked to find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on the wrong side of the rope line.
But there was one invite decision that did seem vaguely curious: the omission of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon….if anyone should be attending a state dinner these days, it’s Dimon, whom The New York Times once dubbed “President Obama’s favorite banker.” And yet, as the months have passed, Dimon’s frustration over the direction of administration policy has become palpable.