Instead, there were appeals to the morality of Wall Street. Some might have thought that the president was joking when he said that “some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged there is family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business, or save for retirement.” That’s a bit like the President going up to Ossining to address an assembly of inmates at Sing-Sing and saying “some of you forget that every time you rob a bodega, a hard-working Hispanic storekeeper gets hurt.”

But keep in mind that such rhetoric is not aimed at the bankers sitting in his audience (who must have had a hernia from keeping from laughing), but at a public that may genuinely believe that moral considerations ever play a role at any major bank.

Bankers care about appeals to their morality the way they care about the crank pickets that sometimes materialize in front of the New York Stock Exchange. They’ll continue to pour money into lobbyists to fight the financial reform package. I’ll bet some of these bankers got on their cell phones to Washington, telling their people to ratchet up the pressure, right after they finished applauding.

Obama, of course, is not a naive man. He knows better than to think that he can appeal to the public spirit of the bankers who got us into the worst financial mess since the 1930s. He is a realistic man. Why else would he have hired as his closest advisers some of the same people who got us into our current mess—such as his economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who was one of the principal architects of the regulatory death squad that assassinated regulation of derivatives 10 years ago? Obama is a pragmatist, not an idealist. An idealist would not have hired Summers or his then-deputy Timothy Geithner.

Still, one has a right to hope. The ranks of the Republicans may be cracking. The timing of his Cooper Union speech, and above all that SEC case against Goldman, couldn’t have been better. But let’s not be as naive as the president’s speech assumes us to be: He is in a hell of a fight. Financial reform still faces a Wall Street lobbyist steamroller, and I don’t see this speech, or any speech, changing that reality very much.