More lies from Yglesias

Matt asks a provocative question that, after a bit of consideration, has, I think, a pretty simple answer.

Here’s what I don’t understand about either the politics or the policy of the bailout failure. If the situation is as dire as Kevin Drum says then where’s corporate America? That swathe of American business that isn’t in the finance and housing sectors. ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Google, Chevron, etc. I mean this as a genuine question, not as an “aha! one lonely blogger has used his powers to prove that there’s no crisis.” But, seriously, where?

Or couple answers maybe. For one thing, if you look back to this map, you can see that a lot of the "yea" votes came from places where big corporations are a significant part of the social fabric. Not all of them. But many of them. Arkansas delegation voted for the bailout. So did a number of representatives from Baltimore-Washington/Northern Virginia, New York, San Francisco (particularly the high-tech South Bay), Seattle, and Houston. The Chamber of Commerce was behind it.

And yet it failed. A lot of people are tempted, I think, to see this as evidence of the crackup of the conservative coalition, or to question the consensus that the Republican party sits in the palm of big business, but I'm not so sure it says much about that at all. More likely, I think major business interests did lobby for it--wanted it to pass--but didn't stick their noses out too far both because they didn't want to make the bailout more craven than the population at large already thought it was, and, more importantly, because they were probably assured that it would pass. All the Republican "no" votes were to be seen not as the conservative abandonment of the bosom of big business, but rather as part of a political gambit that would get big business and Wall Street everything it needed and allow the GOP to run against the Democrats from the populist left. The gambit just happened to fail.

It's a reductive way of looking at the question, and it assumes a lot. But to me it fits the facts better than does the assumption that Republicans finally found their soft spots for working people.