(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE PRESIDENTIAL campaign season has begun, and the Democratic hopefuls are descending on Wall Street. Over the past few months, Senator Joseph Biden, ex- Senator Gary Hart, ex-governor Bruce Babbitt, and Congressman Richard A. Gephardt have all trod the concrete canyons seeking support and, ultimately, money. Deferential visits to Wall Street are now as routine for Democratic candidates as deferential attendance on the AFL-CIO executive council. This year the scramble on the Street seemed more intense than ever after New York Governor Mario Cuomo -- the previous favorite of many investment bankers -- pulled out of the race. The largess of Wall Street liberals is vital to the Democrats, who have generally proved less adept than Republicans at attracting small contributions through direct mail. Last time around, investment banker Robert E. Rubin of Goldman Sachs headed a financial drive in New York that collected about $3 million for the Mondale campaign. That figure represented almost 20% of all the money privately raised for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. So there is a lot of competition for Rubin's services these days, and also for that of his 1983 vice chairman, Roger Altman, now of Shearson Lehman Brothers. Other loyal Democrats on the Street include such eminences as John H. Gutfreund, C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers; Herbert A. Allen, president of Allen & Co. Inc.; Harry A. Jacobs Jr., the recently retired chief executive of Prudential-Bache Securities; Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Freres partner famous as the man who designed New York City's financial rescue; Richard Fisher, president of Morgan Stanley; Lewis W. Bernard, a Morgan colleague of Fisher's who serves on the firm's six-man management committee; Peter Solomon, vice chairman of Shearson Lehman Brothers; William Benedetto, an executive vice president of Dean Witter Reynolds; First Boston's Bruce Wasserstein, one of the Street's premier mergers and acquisitions specialists; and Richard Jenrette, the newly elected chairman of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Liberals on Wall Street? Atheists in the Curia? It somehow sounds wildly improbable. The financial community has always been overwhelmingly Republican. A 1982 American Stock Exchange poll of leading investment bankers and others on Wall Street indicated that 75% had voted for Reagan. Still, Wall Street does seem to produce more than its share of well-heeled businessmen with liberal leanings. What accounts for the mavericks? Anyone who has been around the Street for a time can think of a few hypotheses. To start with, the financial community is a flower in an intensely liberal garden. New York City has been liberal Democratic territory for many decades. Thirty years ago this environment did not matter so much to the Street's leaders. They were predominantly WASP, instinctively Republican and conservative, rooted in a world where old-school ties and family connections were critical to getting ahead. In the past 20 years, however, this world has crumbled and been replaced by a meritocracy. The Street has been transformed by what some call ''the rise of the ethnics.'' And, not surprisingly, liberal political attitudes came with this transformation. Asked to explain his politics, A. Robert Towbin, 52, a prominent investment banker now at Shearson Lehman Brothers, responds crisply: ''I come from a middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn.'' His father, a spice salesman, idolized Roosevelt, Towbin recalls; he was himself energized politically, during his student days at Dartmouth, by concern about McCarthyism. Towbin became a money raiser for, successively, Robert Kennedy, ex-governor Hugh Carey, and Mario Cuomo. ''When asked whether I'm a liberal,'' he says, ''I always say I'm a little left of that.'' At the end of a long lunch with Towbin, you are a bit vague about the definition of his leftism, although it seems to require a drastic reshaping of capitalism. NEW YORK'S BRAND of politics is not the only reason Wall Street produces so many liberals. Another reason is unions -- none of any consequence can be found on the Street. So unionism in finance does not represent the kind of insistent pressure on profits that in other industries turns limousine-liberal businessmen into flaming reactionaries. Nor do Wall Streeters feel overburdened by government regulation, another common incitement to conservative attitudes. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been around so long -- over half a century, well beyond the experience of most brokers and investment bankers -- that it is accepted as an inescapable fact of life on the Street. SEC regulation has not generally been economically oppressive: The Street does not get suddenly saddled with huge capital expenditures related to cleaning up waste dumps or eliminating noxious gases. Wall Streeters have noticed that they can thrive whether the powers in Washington are Democratic or Republican. And as a lot of investment bankers have been painfully reminded in recent months, the Republicans have been as tough as the Democrats, or maybe even tougher, in cracking down on insider trading and other transgressions. So in the end it is perhaps not surprising to find more liberal moneybags on Wall Street than in, say, metal bending. Yet if you spend much time with the Street's liberals, you come away struck by the diverse explanations they offer for their maverick status. Some of them obviously just enjoy being mavericks. The first time I called on Salomon's John Gutfreund, several years ago, I was surprised to hear him announce his views with an amiable but unmistakable trace of belligerence: He was not only a Democrat, he avowed, but in 1972 he had supported George McGovern, the most liberal of all recent presidential candidates and a nominee held in particularly low esteem on Wall Street. Gutfreund, now 57, came to Salomon in the early Fifties as a trainee (annual compensation: $2,400). He had served in Korea after graduating from Oberlin and was already a liberal, though not an activist. Nothing he has experienced on the Street has led him to change his views. Another Wall Streeter who plainly relishes minority status is Prudential- Bache's Harry Jacobs, 65. Asked recently if he had ever been victimized or embarrassed by being a Democrat, Jacobs replied candidly: ''I always sort of enjoyed it, because there are so few Democrats on Wall Street. It's been fun to be one of a small group.''

JACOBS'S OWN CASE is actually more complex than those words suggest. Until the mid-1960s, he was a Republican. The Vietnam war changed his mind. ''I was sort of gung-ho at first,'' says Jacobs. ''Then I saw what the war did to young people. I was always close to my two kids; I started to think that they were right and I was wrong.'' He ended up as an antiwar Democrat, a process furthered by many conversations with Clark Clifford, President Truman's former counsel, who had been retained for years by Bache as a Washington lawyer. Jacobs started raising money for the Democrats and recently served for two years as chairman of the Democratic Business Council, a group of 175 business and professional men who each pay at least $10,000 a year to support the party. Some other liberal Democrats on the Street seem to have come to their allegiance by inheritance. Goldman's Robert Rubin, 49, tells of a grandfather who was an official of a Democratic club in Brooklyn. Arthur Levitt Jr., 56, chairman of the American Stock Exchange, is the son of one of the most popular Democratic vote getters in New York State history. (Arthur Sr. served as state controller for over two decades.) Young Levitt never considered being anything but a Democrat. Richard Jenrette, 58, one of the founders of the brokerage firm of Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette (now owned by Equitable Life), grew up in North Carolina in an era when everybody in the state -- to exaggerate only slightly -- was a Democrat. ''The only question was whether you were a liberal or conservative Democrat,'' Jenrette points out. He was himself always affiliated with the liberal wing of the party, led by Terry Sanford, formerly governor and now Senator, but says he liked to think of himself as a middle- of-the-roader. RAISED IN LOUISIANA, venture capitalist Hamilton Richardson, 53, is also a Democrat by reason of geography. Well known as a tennis player 30 years ago -- for a time he was the top-ranked U.S. amateur -- he also worked as a legislative assistant to Senator Russell Long of Louisiana before gravitating to the brokerage business. (He went to work for Smith Barney but now has his own investment firm.) Richardson was one of the first money raisers in New York to sign on for Gephardt. Felix Rohatyn of Lazard Freres also talks as though his politics are somehow a ''given'' in his life. Says Rohatyn, 58: ''I characterize myself as a Democrat and a liberal and as somebody who believes in an active role for government.'' How did he come by his view? ''I'm a refugee,'' replies Rohatyn. ''I lived under the Nazis. I came here in 1942. My vision of the United States was Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal -- high points in the history of this country. I've never wavered from that.'' A younger group on Wall Street formed political attachments during the exuberant Kennedy-Johnson years and remain committed to their original ideals, undiscouraged by the failures of Great Society programs. Richard C. Leone, 45, a managing director at Dillon Read, characterizes himself as a liberal Democrat and adds: ''I'm a 1960s Democrat. I believe we didn't do too much in the 1960s; we did too little.'' A former state treasurer in New Jersey, he took four months off in 1984 to work for Mondale. He is still searching for a candidate to back in 1988. Roger Altman, 41, made his debut as a political activist in 1968, when he took time off from his MBA studies at the University of Chicago to campaign for Robert Kennedy in the Indiana presidential primary. ''It was unbelievably exciting,'' he recalls. Years later, after becoming a partner at Lehman Brothers, he served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for domestic finance during the Carter Administration. Altman is very much a self-made man. He comes from a lower-middle-class family in Boston. His father died when he was 8, and he got through college and business school with the help of scholarships, loans, and the proceeds of vacation jobs. He recalls being so impoverished as a graduate student in the late 1960s that he could budget only $10 a week for food, a sum that was fortunately supplemented by the five free dinners a week he earned cooking for some fellow students. Altman knows many colleagues of similar background, and his explanation for the phenomenon of the Wall Street liberal is simple: ''One reason many people of means are liberal is that they come from modest beginnings, which they remember as though it were only yesterday -- and they feel motivated to help others who haven't had the same good fortune.'' It sounds like a plausible, and heartfelt, explanation of Altman's own views, though many self-made men are profoundly conservative. It is often said that people who inherit big money feel guilty and are instinctively driven to liberal causes by such feelings. It might be added that wealth bestowed by the stock market is somewhat analogous to inherited wealth; at least both cases involve a lot of luck. None of the Wall Street liberals interviewed for this article confessed to any connection between their politics and a sense of guilt. Still, it is possible to suspect that vagrant emotion skulking behind the endless comments about inequality made by some of them. Thus, Salomon's John Gutfreund: ''I've always felt that when you have much more than you need, and other people have much less, that's not a natural situation in perpetuity. If that kind of thinking makes you a liberal, that's what I am.'' Or Goldman's Robert Rubin in a recent interview: ''I just think that winners win too big and losers lose too big.'' He added, waving in the direction of Harlem: ''I don't think a society as affluent as ours should have conditions of the sort that exist 40 blocks north of here.'' Michael Johnston, 48, a Paine Webber alumnus who is now president of Capital International Ltd., an investment management firm, also says he has inequality on his mind. Johnston started out as a traditional Midwestern Republican. In 1967 he joined a small brokerage house, Mitchell Hutchins, which retained a group of outside consultants -- among them Henry Kissinger, Bill Moyers, and economist Otto Eckstein -- who periodically met with and presumably dazzled the firm's important clients. Exposed to these savants, Johnston says he began to think more seriously about political and social issues, a reevaluation that led to his becoming a Democrat. The heart of the matter, he says, is that the party was concerned with the ''least advantaged'' members of society. In 1984 Johnston was Gary Hart's principal money raiser on Wall Street; he will be rattling the tin cup for Hart again in the coming campaign. PERHAPS THE ODDEST conversion on record is that of Arthur Carter, 55, a former investment banker (Carter Berlind & Weill) who last year became the principal owner of the Nation, the venerable left-liberal weekly magazine. Carter bought control by assuming $2 million of debt and agreeing to invest another $2 million to $4 million over the next several years. Yet during his years in investment banking, Carter recalled recently, ''I don't think I had a clear point of view, either liberal or conservative.'' What changed him? About ten years ago he decided to get into the publishing business. He liked what he called the ''tangibility'' of the product; it appears that newspapers and magazines looked more tangible than Wall Street deals. He also liked the fact that journalism dealt with politics, economics, and world affairs. Carter gives some indication of having become a bit bored with his business life, which was then largely devoted to investments in real estate, water utilities, and manufacturing. His first move, in 1980, was to found the Litchfield County Times, a Connecticut weekly, but after a couple of years he started searching for a journal of opinion, and that led to the ailing Nation. He started reading the magazine closely and found that he liked what he read. ''I don't think I'll shape the Nation,'' says Carter, ''but it has shaped my point of view, philosophically and politically.'' He agrees he has become what might be called a Nation liberal. The first fruit of his conversion was a remarkable op-ed piece in the New York Times last September, proposing a 1% annual tax on capital. He argued ! that the tax could generate revenue of $100 billion a year and thus cut the federal deficit in half. Carter is reportedly worth around $100 million, so his own annual tab might come to $1 million. He didn't suggest the net worth level at which the tax would take effect, nor did he deal with the problem of illiquidity that would confront many taxpayers whose capital was in, say, real estate. HE CONCENTRATED instead on the soak-the-rich aspect of the levy, arguing that ''it might even herald the beginning of a society with goals other than capital accumulation . . . Maybe, in time, the allure of money for money's sake will die down and with it the attractions of such professions as investment banking, where fortunes are made for providing a service this country can probably do without.'' Carter stops just short of urging the old socialist slogan of ''production for use, not for profit.'' Herbert Allen, 47, tells a story of his conversion that leaves you thinking he could just as easily have ended up a Republican. President of Allen & Co. Inc. since he was 27, he was something of a political neuter back in 1965. One day an associate urged him to receive a senatorial candidate from Minnesota named Walter Mondale. Allen initially demurred, but finally agreed if Mondale would meet him for a 6:30 breakfast at a Wall Street restaurant. To his surprise, Mondale showed up, the two men hit it off, and Allen made a campaign contribution. Mondale, in turn, introduced Allen to Hubert Humphrey, then Vice President, and he met other Democrats as well. He acquired his politics from his new friends. Allen explains: ''When your friends are on one side of the aisle, you kind of follow your friends a little bit.'' Speaking of presidential candidates, he says, ''In 20 years I've never seen a Democrat who wasn't better than the alternative.'' He and his wife contributed $56,000 to Humphrey's presidential campaign in 1968, and Allen has remained a loyal benefactor of the party ever since. Over the years, his friendship with Mondale flourished. In 1984, after the exertions of the primary season, Mondale spent a week resting at Allen's seaside estate in Southampton, on New York's Long Island. The process by which the Street generates money for candidates is more complicated than it used to be. It is no longer possible, as it was before the reform of the campaign finance laws in 1974, for a wealthy individual to contribute unlimited amounts to a candidate by making multiple donations (up to $5,000 each) to multiple campaign committees. Mr. and Mrs. Allen can no longer give $56,000 to any one candidate. Indeed, the last campaign witnessed Allen contributing only $1,000 each to the Mondale, Askew, and Cranston committees. The present $1,000 limit greatly complicates the work of a campaign finance committee. ''You have to do it as if you were selling Tupperware,'' says Roger Altman. In 1983 Mondale came to New York two days a month, from February through November, during which period his schedule featured a breakfast, lunch, two cocktail parties, and dinner each day. Some 40 to 60 people attended each event, at $1,000 per head. Rubin, Altman, and Nancy Kuhn (a professional fund raiser) put together an elaborate telephone network, starting with their own personal friends, who in turn contacted their friends, in order to sell tickets. The final event occurred in December, a glittering diner for 320 stragglers who had not been able to make the prior parties. THE WALL STREETERS orchestrating these events are clearly a varied lot, but in the Reagan era all claim to be fiscal conservatives, alarmed by the grievous imbalance of the federal budget during a period of prosperity. In these views Wall Street Democrats differ not at all from Wall Street Republicans. What does set the two groups apart are their different outlooks on social policy, on the liberals' commitment to the politics of compassion and the goals of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, as well as their benign view of the role of government in furthering economic justice. Wall Street liberals have not been notably successful at influencing the ideas of the politicians they support, possibly because most of the Wall Streeters are not entirely at home in the world of ideas. Their formulations about politics are stronger on basic themes -- reducing inequality, say -- than on thought-through political programs. To be sure, the politicians visiting them will be suitably deferential to the ideas they hear. Indeed, one of Gary Hart's press agents recently suggested that his February trip to Wall Street was ''nonpolitical.'' The lady would have you believe that Hart was visiting the financial community in search of enlightenment, not cultivating support. Herbert Allen would be surprised to find any candidates seeking enlightenment on the Street. ''People on Wall Street who think they are having an impact on politicians are kidding themselves,'' he says. Allen, it happens, has a lot of ideas. For example, he proposes a Marshall Plan for South America. He also has a plan envisaging major foreign policy gains if the U.S. pushes for the reunification of Germany. But he leaves you thinking the candidates really have only one thing in mind when they traverse those canyons downtown. And it isn't ideas.