Dems usually win money chase on Wall Street

Back in 2006, Democrats began a hard sell on Wall Street led by New York senator Chuck Schumer and then-representative Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff. The basic pitch was that Democrats were taking Congress, and the financial world should get on board - surely delivered with all the bare-knuckled subtlety for which those two are justly renowned.

Democrats beat Republicans in the Wall Street money chase in 2006, and kept on going. In the 2008 election cycle, Democrats garnered 73 percent of the political donations of Goldman Sachs, as well as the majority of donations from other financial giants such as UBS and Citigroup. They soaked up most of the hedge-fund money, and won the battle for donations from industries as varied as health care, defense, and law.

After Voltaire attended his first orgy and was invited back again, he declined on grounds that once was an experiment, but twice would be perverse. Its experiment has gone horribly wrong, yet Wall Street has persisted in its perversity.

At the end of last year, the Center for Responsive Politics wrote of hedge funds and private equity firms, "This election cycle is proving to be the most left-leaning for the industry." And it wasn't just finance. "Democrats have an enormous lead in almost every business sector they denounce," NR's Kevin D. Williamson noted in January.