Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
Eric Grossman doesn’t look like he would want to do anything drastic. The top lawyer at Morgan Stanley is a 51-year-old homeowner in the New York suburbs with twin sons and a seat on the firm’s management committee. He’s another man in a power suit in a midtown Manhattan bank.
He also wants to topple America’s two-party system.
Or so he says.
Grossman is trying to build a new party—called the Serve America Movement, or SAM—even though third wheels in American politics tend to have the lasting power of the Free Soilers and the Anti-Masons. His quixotic goal hasn’t deterred donors that include fellow members of Morgan Stanley’s operating committee, the bank’s head of government relations, its top independent board member, and the last chief executive officer, John Mack.
Nothing says “in touch with the center of America” quite like a party founded and funded by New York City bankers…
Don’t expect this crusade for unity to turn into the next Women’s March, Tea Party, or even a semi-memorable hashtag. At least so far, this is what resistance to President Donald Trump looks like on Wall Street. Even though tax cuts and reduced regulation have made big banks and corporations some of this era’s big winners, many of their executives squirm when the president abandons global agreements and threatens trade wars. These people also tend to resent and even dread the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, as if it’s out to get them personally. That opens a space for SAM’s unlikely, ambitious and well-moneyed cry for something else.
“Perhaps it’s a fear of arrogance that people are like, ‘Wow you can’t say that, you can’t say you’re going to be a party,’” said Richard Bennett, a partner at investment firm B-FORE Capital who contributed $140,000 to SAM. “I’m like, why not? What else are we going to do? That’s the only thing that’s going to fix it.”
SAM stands against divisiveness, but what it stands for isn’t obvious. One Morgan Stanley executive who donated admitted he doesn’t know anything about it, he just wanted to help a friend’s pet cause.
SAM’s upbeat website, with no specifics on immigration, reproductive rights, or the health-care system, can’t clear up big questions. The principles are so broad and cheerful—“applying America’s innovative spirit,” “a strong, clear-eyed, values-based leader,” and “the vitality of local communities”—that they have the ring of taglines for a Silicon Valley startup that hasn’t put out a product yet.
This inoffensive flavor makes sense for a political project backed by executives from Morgan Stanley, a big bank with a particularly understated political style.
Snip.
Grossman is the kind of big-time bank attorney who made it into the club of Wall Street lawyers that flew to the Trianon Palace Versailles hotel outside Paris in 2016 to talk shop. He isn’t enrolled in a party, and he’s donated about $28,000 outside of SAM, money that tended to go to moderate Democrats and Morgan Stanley’s Republican-leaning political action committee.
Looks like somebody didn’t do their homework.
Assuming that the Eric Grossman of Larchmont, NY, zip 10538 who works for Morgan Stanley is in fact the same person as the Eric Grossman of New York, NY, 10036 who works for Morgan Stanley, then the phrase “moderate Democrats” would be what we outside the confines of New York City would refer to as “a lie.”
Let’s look at who Grossman has contributed to:
Multiple donations to Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, arguably the sixth most liberal senator.
Democratic U.S. House candidate Antonio Delgado, a quick look at whose issues page shows zero deviation from far-left Democratic Party boilerplate.
The politics of Reshma M. Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, are harder to get a bead on, since she lost the Democratic U.S. House race Grossman contributed to by a whopping 68 points despite raising $1.3 million for the race (or $213 for every vote received).
Democratic Senators Michael F. Bennet, Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner (all of whom Grossman contributed to) might be considered “moderates” only by Democratic Party standards, not those of the American people.
According to Open Secrets, he’s never donated to a Republican candidate.
He may or may not be the Eric F. Grossman of New York, NY, zip 10019 who worked for Morgan Stanley and who donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton in 2007.
A look at Serve America Movement’s twitter feed shows that they’re anti-NRA, pro-illegal alien, and anti-Trump.
If all this sounds strangely familiar, it’s because it sounds an awful lot like “The Coffee Party” or “No Labels,” ostensibly centrist organizations that just happened to pop up to great media attention when the Tea Party was gaining momentum. Both of those are apparently moribund now, just like the “Serve America Movement” will be once it’s goal of stopping Republican momentum has failed like the others as well…
(Hat tip: Iowahawk.)