The Home Depot Man Who Wants to Demolish Obama

Wall Street titan Ken Langone, who cofounded the main street box store, is heavily invested in Obama’s defeat this fall.

Robert Caplin/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


On November 1, more than 100 wealthy political donors, including former New York Stock Exchange CEO Dick Grasso, streamed into the luxurious Conrad Suite at the Waldorf-Astoria on Manhattan’s Park Avenue for a lunchtime fundraiser. The event was a smashing success, raising six figures for Mitt Romney—three times what had been expected. Save for the candidate himself, no one could have been more pleased than Ken Langone, the legendary investment banker who had organized the fundraiser and who, armed with a fat Rolodex and the pugnacity of a by-the-bootstraps billionaire, wants nothing more than to defeat Barack Obama in 2012.

The 76-year-old Home Depot cofounder looks how you’d imagine a self-proclaimed “fat cat” might: tall, broad-shouldered, and jowly, with a crown of white hair and a penchant for crisp collars. Langone, who dug ditches as a young man, is a legend in corporate America, and his vast network of business titans could prove crucial to Romney if he faces the cash-flush Obama political machine. (At the start of this year, Obama had raised $88 million to Romney’s $32 million.) “You’d be hard-pressed to find a major CEO that wouldn’t take his call,” says his friend Anthony Carbonetti, a former bundler for Rudy Giuliani. “Everyone takes his call—because they want to know what he has to say.”

Langone is a prodigious donor, having given millions to New York University and New York City charities, including the Harlem Children’s Zone. He’s also given hundreds of thousands to conservative groups, like the Republican National Committee, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC, and the American Action Network, the dark-money outfit run by former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman. Langone strongly backed his friend Ross Perot for president in 1992 and was a bundler for Giuliani in 2008.

Recently, Langone has embraced a new role as an unabashed critic of the president. Last summer, after the White House and Congress (whose members Langone compared to “sex fiends” when around money) clashed over lifting the federal government’s debt ceiling, Langone branded Obama “petulant” and “unpresidential” on CNBC. He even ripped the president for entering the Oval Office without a suit jacket on—something, Langone insisted, Ronald Reagan never would have done. (PolitiFact rated this claim “mostly false”; Reagan sometimes wore track jackets in the Oval Office on weekends.) Obama is “not bringing us together,” Langone said. “Divide us and we all lose. This has got to stop.”

Before getting behind Romney, Langone spearheaded the effort to draft New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and as Politico reported, he brought together “50 of the most prized donors” for a conference call to urge him to run. Christie declined, but he noted that if he did challenge Obama, he’d have no problem raising money.

Langone says that since he threw his lot in with Romney, he’s helped bring 90 percent of the megadonors on the Christie conference call into the Romney camp. “I would say virtually everybody who tried to persuade Christie is partial to Romney,” he told me when I reached him at his winter home in North Palm Beach, Florida. “Don’t forget: It’s the art of the possible, not the impossible,” he said. “Romney appears to be the likely candidate for the Republican Party.”

This kind of realpolitik speaks to Langone’s political pragmatism. He’s no right-wing ideologue, and he occasionally sides with and donates to Democrats, like New York’s Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Sen. Charles Schumer. He served on the transition team of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he called “one of the greatest governors I’ve seen—ever” because of his “practical,” pro-jobs agenda. And last summer, Langone said superrich people like himself should pay more in taxes to help to pay down the national debt. “We’ve gotta take some pain,” he told Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network.

But Langone also has a cutthroat, no-holds-barred side. In 2004, then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer came after Langone, a director at the New York Stock Exchange, for approving a massive $140 million payout for Grasso, the NYSE’s recently departed CEO. Langone, who had already left the NYSE due to the furor, developed an abiding resentment of Spitzer. “I’m nuts, I’m rich, and boy, do I love a fight!” he thundered about Spitzer to Fortune‘s Peter Elkind. Alex Gibney’s documentary Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer intimates that Langone had a role in Spitzer’s downfall amid a prostitution scandal in 2008. Langone firmly denies this, but the film leaves no doubt about his withering intensity.

Will Langone bring the same animosity to his fight against Obama? When I spoke with him, he emphasized that his opposition to the president was strictly business: Obama had created an anti-business climate in the country. “This man,” he declared as he headed out for a haircut, “has failed horribly.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate