Obama is angry today at the Senate for listening to the money and dropping their assault on private equity firms. The sentiment is dead on -- except he is a member of that Senate. I understand campaigning takes up all a candidate's time, but if he worried so much about reform on this getting accomplished, he could have pushed Harry Reid a little. Word from your party's presidential candidates that they really need a chance to register a crucial Senate vote has some influence. Obama gets more money from private equity than any other leading presidential candidate besides Mitt Romney, and he took in four times the amount from Blackstone (the company that mounted the outlandish, record-breaking $3.7 million lobbying effort against closing the loophole) as Hillary did in the second fundraising quarter ($43,700 vs her $11,600). I haven't seen him pushing this issue before or leading with it on the stump (unlike Edwards), and not to put on my tinfoil hat here, but Noam has noted that he -- along with Hillary and Edwards -- didn't come out against closing the tax loophole until after June 30, after the second quarter's fundraising deadline had passed and several months after the private equity debate heated up to the boiling point and was beginning to cool. Maybe I'm being too harsh -- I don't think it's unreasonable for Obama to hold off on railing against his big supporters as he campaigns. I even like that financial services people are behind him -- they're an innovative group. But his sudden sniping at cowardly congressmen and evil private equity lobbyists is a bit of blame-shifting. The statement he released today says:

If there was ever a doubt that Washington lobbyists don't actually represent real Americans, it's the fact that they stopped leaders of both parties from requiring elite investment firms to pay their fair share of taxes.

Well, who hired those lobbyists? They did not just descend as a flock on the Senate on their own steam, riled up by the injustice about to be perpetrated against their Wall Street drinking buddies. These lobbyists may not "represent real Americans," but they represent Obama's donors, literally. Update: A friend who's an Obama fan points out that Obama's "Tax Fairness Plan" speech in mid-September did touch on private equity, and the media coverage of the speech gave the point play. --Eve Fairbanks