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NEW YORK, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Wall Street lobbyists are telling Democrats they can't have it both ways: They can't support Occupy Wall Street protests and then ask for Wall Street cash. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a recent e-mail calling on supporters to sign a petition backing the protests. Then livid banking executives called DCCC officials demanding answers, financial services lobbyists told Politico.
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"Most Wall Street guys, they feel like they're going to be burned in effigy," Anthony Scaramucci told the newspaper. Scaramucci is a managing partner of SkyBridge Capital who gave to the Obama campaign in 2008. Now he is fundraising for Mitt Romney, and told Politico other moderate donors "fled from [President] Obama in his support of the Wall Street protests."
Obama narrowly raised more Wall Street campaign funding in 2008 than Republican nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona. But now Democrats are facing a particularly hard sell, the newspaper said.
"You can't have it both ways," one unnamed in-house financial services lobbyist told Politico. "It just makes it harder for people who are Democrats in New York, Boston, Chicago to on the one hand be demogagued and then be asked 'Hey, you can get your picture with the president for $30,000.' It doesn't square."
Meanwhile, senior Obama political strategist David Axelrod tied Romney to Wall Street antics. The Hill newspaper said the president's re-election campaign is playing up to the surging Occupy Wall Street protests.
"I think there's some question as to what [Romney's] core convictions are," Axelrod said Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I think, also, he says he represents business, but he really represents the Wall Street side of business ... he stripped down companies and outsourced jobs in ways that I think reflect people's concerns about the economy."
The latest Gallup poll indicates most Americans think there's plenty of blame to go around.
Seventy-eight percent of U.S. adults say Wall Street bears a great deal or a fair amount of blame for the economy, but 87 percent say the same about Washington, said the poll, conducted last weekend when the Occupy Wall Street protest movement finished its first month.
The protest has spread from a small group gathered in a New York park between Wall Street and the World Trade Center site to a nearly global movement active in hundreds of cities.
Forty-four percent of Americans tell Gallup the U.S. economic system is personally unfair to them, while 54 percent say it is fair.
About a fifth of adults support Occupy movement -- about the same percentage as those supporting the Tea Party movement and its conservative agenda, the poll found.
The poll of 1,026 adults ages 18 and older has a 3 percent sampling error.
A separate poll released Monday by Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., found 67 percent of New York City residents agreed with the Occupy Wall Street protesters' views.
That survey of 1,068 registered voters also has a 3 percent sampling error.
The New York protests were peaceful Monday. But in Seattle, police arrested people who wouldn't move their tents from a park.
In Oakland, Calif., the Occupy movement got support from three American hikers freed after being held in Iran on espionage charges.
Josh Fattal, Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd Monday night cheered the idealism and activism of the Occupy movement, which began Sept. 17, four days before the two men were released by Iranian authorities. Shourd was freed a year earlier.
