Wall Street to GOP: Drop Dead

Might there be some huge political realignment going on? One sign of it is the growing disenchantment between Wall Street/Big Business and the GOP. From today's WSJ:

Sen. John McCain badly needs the cash infusion and momentum from a Tuesday night fund-raiser in New York. But the senator's recent demonizing of Wall Street made it tough to lure contributors, with Wall Street and corporate executives balancing their aggravation with the Republican presidential hopeful against their rising unease about his Democratic opponent. [On] Sept. 24, tensions heightened when Sen. McCain, who had come to New York for the United Nations session, met with key business supporters, including Cisco Systems' CEO John Chambers, retired E-Bay CEO Meg Whitman and private-equity guru Henry Kravis. The campaign invited these executives just the night before to show up at the Manhattan hotel for an emergency meeting. After the media left a photo op with the group, the financiers gave Sen. McCain an earful. Some of them warned him against getting personal and making Wall Street the scapegoat for the nation's troubles.

Me: So not only do you have the GOP nominee blasting Wall Street and losing the tax issue to his Democratic opponent, you have House Republicans as the key obstacle to the financial rescue plan. It's like what might have happened had Mike Huckabee gotten the nomination. The credit crisis, the $700 billion Paulson Plan, in particular—seems to have only accelerated a split that began with the go-go Clinton era, where you had a Democratic president who seemed pro-Wall Street both with his economic policies and cultural permissiveness. But can you be for the Investor Class and bash Wall Street at the same time? A hard push for lower cap gains rates and corporate tax, and a spirited defense of deregulation and free markets seem to be in the interest of both. But McCain has been doing little of that, many on the right say . And today's new economic plan is certainly a step in the wrong direction to many of those folks who see it as incrementalist.