This exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Kevin Williamson on the relationship between conservatives and Wall Street is worth reading to get an idea of how detached from reality Hewitt is:

KW: Well, I don’t know that they’re necessarily all that anti-Romney, although they’re certainly more pro-Obama. The thing is that there is a great misconception that Wall Street is politically conservative, or even that big business, high finance in general is politically conservative. It’s not. If you look at the kinds of issues that most American conservatives really care about, where they are culturally, where they are morally, where they are religiously, these guys aren’t there. And not only are they not there, they’re actively opposed to it. I mean, these are guys making five, six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year who live in Manhattan and getting manicures and sending their kids to Choate and places like that. They’re not showing up at parent’s day in a Sarah Palin T-shirt. That’s just not who they are, not what they believe. But the one thing that they really are good at is using the rhetoric of being pro-business and being pro-free enterprise to kind of buffalo us conservatives, and get us to agree to all sorts of favors and subsidies and handouts for them.

HH: I’m just not going to buy that. I do think they might show up in a Sarah Palin T-shirt, and I do think that they are generally often quite conservative, very Evangelical. Some are deeply Roman Catholic, traditionalist, generous, high-minded people.

What’s striking here is that Williamson is describing the reality of the political preferences of people working on Wall Street that any reasonably informed person understands, and all Hewitt can do is recycle fusionist stereotypes that were always more myth than reality anyway. It’s blindingly obvious that most people working in the financial sector have no strong attachment to social conservatism or small government political principles. For one thing, neither of them is particularly relevant to them or their interests, and they correctly see both of them as obstacles or distractions from what they believe government should be doing. One story that comes to mind is a report earlier this year on the problems that Perry was having making connections with the financial industry. They weren’t all that interested in the fact that Perry was perfectly happy to give them whatever they wanted in terms of regulation and legislation, because they thought he was too conservative to be electable. He was a bad fit with the crowd of financial executives because he was too conservative:

Last week, Mr. Perry went to New York for three fund-raising events, including a dinner hosted by former American International Group Inc. chief Hank Greenberg. That was a first step toward winning over financial-services executives, many of whom mix conservative views on economics and taxes with more-liberal positions on social issues such as gun control, same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Wall Street largely backed President Barack Obama in the 2008 election before souring on his anti-banker rhetoric and financial-services regulations [bold mine-DL].

Given the choice between Messrs. Perry and Romney, the primary’s current front-runners, many are opting for the latter. While both candidates voice similar views on social issues on the campaign trail, Mr. Romney’s track record governing a liberal state and background in finance make him a more comfortable fit for many Wall Streeters.

What bothered some of the people interviewed for the story was that he was a socially conservative evangelical:

Hedge-fund manger Leon Cooperman said he is “negative” on Mr. Perry because he thinks the Texan is too conservative on social issues. “I’m a great believer in separation of church and state,” Mr. Cooperman said. “Any guy that has a meeting to pray for rain—that’s a guy I’m not voting for.”

Huckabee encountered a lot of the same hostility, but at least he used rhetoric that made him sound like an economic populist. Perry has no interest in economic populism of any kind, but insofar as he really is socially conservative and religious he puts off people in the financial sector because they cannot identify with him and they are alienated from him because he does not share their values. Hewitt has long been a reliable backer of Romney, but he seems not to know anything about the world in which Romney flourished and made his career for most of his adult life.

Update: The original Williamson essay on financial institutions that started all of this is here.