The business community: still smart

Check out this great story about how business groups are abandoning the Republicans and flocking to the Democrats. A couple statistics:

All 10 of the top-giving industries tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan money and politics watchdog group, are now donating more cash to Democrats than Republicans. A year ago, Republicans had the edge in six of the 10 sectors...

Even the big drug companies are trying to warm up to their adversaries; that sector is giving at a rate of 50-50. Only the old allies of President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the oil and gas sector are holding firm, giving 72 percent of their donations to Republicans and 28 percent to Democrats...

[T]he Independent Community Bankers of America gave 67 percent of its donations to Republicans and just 33 percent to Democrats during the first three quarters of 2005. Today, Democrats get the lion’s share — 53 percent — compared with a Republican take of 47 percent.

This is great news, of course. But it's worth looking at why this is happening. According to the article, Republicans alienated business lobbies by trying to boss them around with the so-called "K-Street Project". Basically, the Republicans leadership tried to force business lobbies to hire only Republican lobbyists.

Now, business lobbies - unlike, say, the Christian Right - are smart. They understand that if they commit themselves fully to one party, they'll be powerless to stop that party from enacting policies that the businesses don't like - Sarbanes-Oxley, for instance, or immigration restrictions. As the article describes it:

Pay-to-play became the insider mantra during the Republican reign. But “extortion” was how many CEOs described the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.

The fact that businesses recognized that the Republicans, not the businesses, were taking command of the partnership indicates to me something very important: American business is still acting in its own self-interest. They have not signed onto any neocon, theocratic, or other ideological project of "conservative" national transformation. And that means they (and their checkbooks) will stand against the disaster that is Bushism when push comes to shove.

That leaves me feeling a bit relieved, I guess. One wishes, though, that the business community had shown a bit more foresight in, say, 2000.