Don’t read too much into John Feehery’s little nervous breakdown in the Wall Street Journal where he hints that unless his clients start getting their way real soon, big business is going to abandon the Republicans and start bankrolling the Democrats.

To start with, Feehery isn’t big business. He is part of a lobbying firm (granted, lobbying is a big business, but that isn’t what we are talking about). More to the point, Feehery is part of a lobbying industry at a moment when big business must be wondering if they are getting their money’s worth – and I don’t mean from the Republicans. The Export-Import Band Bank is on the chopping block. I’m not going to count out something like the Gang of Eight’s immigration plan passing the 113th Congress until the first meeting of the 114th Congress in January 2015, but the Chamber of Commerce-favored form of immigration reform sure looks to be on its back at the moment. That Feehery feels the need to issue public threats about how his clients are feeling unappreciated is a sign of weakness rather than strength.

Having said that, I can imagine circumstances where there is a temporary estrangement between the majority of big business and the GOP. It would have to involve some Republican presidential candidate who was seen as either an absolutely certain loser and/or dangerously irresponsible. Of the potential Republican presidential candidates, I suspect that many in the business community would see Rick Santorum as a certain loser and perhaps Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul as too irresponsible (Huckabee because he doesn’t seem to care to prepare himself for a serious presidential campaign and Paul because of questions about his foreign policy orientation). In the case of any of those men getting the nomination (and I don’t even think Huckabee wants to be president as much as he might want to use a presidential campaign to refresh his media brand), one can imagine the Democrats getting somewhat more business money as the business lobbies hedge their bets.

The most important thing to remember is that the Democrats will get more business money if they seem like sure winners. Obama was the most liberal Senator when he got plenty of business money in 2008. His opponent was the known amnesty supporter John McCain. What happened? Well, it was obvious that Senator Obama was very likely to win and that Obama was very likely to have an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t ideological. It was business.