Until I read in The New York Times Monday about Wall Street bankers turning on the Democratic Party, I didn't believe there was anything to the theory of spontaneous human combustion. Only when my shaved head caught fire did I reconsider the evidence.

If you read David D. Kirkpatrick's piece, "In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.," you know what I'm talking about. The article is impossible to read without feeling the internal temperature of your body rising to support your sense of righteous indignation.

Who needs thermal insulation while digging out from under record-breaking snow when you can ruminate on Wall Street bankers threatening Democrats with the abrupt cancellation of what was once a mutually beneficial kickback scheme?

Mr. Kirkpatrick wrote: "Just two years after Mr. Obama helped his party pull in record Wall Street contributions -- $89 million from the securities and investment business, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics -- some of his biggest supporters ... have become the industry's chief lobbyists against his regulatory agenda."

The piece continues: "Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street's 'buyer's remorse' with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street 'fat cats,' they may fight back by withholding their cash."

In other words, Wall Street is acting like an affable wife beater who threatens to run off with the town trollop if his wife calls the police again.

Mr. Kirkpatrick's piece clearly illustrates the relationship between the indentured servant class mentality of America's politicians and the deep-pocketed influence peddlers operating in Washington's nexus of power.

We've always known that the nation's two most prominent political parties are bought and paid for like piglets carried home from the state fair, but we prefer to labor under the illusion that our electoral system has some integrity.

The inability of the Democrats to get any meaningful legislation passed, even when they briefly enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, would be inexplicable if the entire system wasn't rigged.

Reading between the lines of Mr. Kirkpatrick's piece, we're given the rare opportunity to see prostitutes and their clients publicly negotiating the price of services to be rendered. Sure, it's tawdry, but it's illuminating in ways that should make an impression on all of us. We shouldn't assume for a second that either party wanders into the red-light district to practice abstinence.

The fact that banks and investment houses feel under "assault" by an administration that invents new ways of being timid in the face of Wall Street's continued intransigence tells us a lot about what it expects in return for the $89 million it gave the Democrats two years ago.

The New York Times piece has another fascinating passage: "Mr. Obama's fight with Wall Street began last year with his proposals for greater oversight of compensation and a consumer financial protection commission. It escalated with verbal attacks this year on what he called Wall Street's 'obscene bonuses.' And it reached a new level in his calls for policies Wall Street finds even more infuriating: a 'financial crisis responsibility' tax aimed only at the biggest banks, and a restriction on 'propriety trading' that banks do with their own money for their own profit."

Mr. Kirkpatrick then quotes an anonymous lobbyist who warns that the president is turning "every Democrat on Wall Street into a Republican."

While I'm pleased by President Obama's populist rhetoric of recent weeks, I suspect that it is nothing more than rhetoric. Thurston Howell III on "Gilligan's Island" is a more convincing populist at this point than Mr. Obama is.

What we need from the president is determined and principled leadership when it comes to reforming our broken and corrupt financial system -- not boilerplate rhetoric. The Democratic Party will have to resign itself to taking the hit from Wall Street if it has any remote hope of living up to the mandate that swept it into power with historic margins in both houses. Groveling to bankers doesn't inspire voters to return you to office.

Again, I'm not silly enough to believe that every Democrat elected or re-elected in 2006 and 2008 serves with altruistic motives, but there is an expectation that the public good will supersede Wall Street's much narrower interests a year after the global economy nearly collapsed.

If the Democratic Party can't figure out that its relationship to Wall Street is closer to a "pact with the devil" than the one evangelist Pat Robertson associated with Haiti, then it deserves its newly minted rep as the party of Wall Street.

Tony's Take on Comix by Tony Norman is featured exclusively in the Opinion section on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.