It looks like Barack Obama isn’t just a voter favorite:

Employees in nine major industries are beginning to turn their money toward Barack Obama’s campaign — a potential new sign that US business is placing their bets on Obama to win the Democratic nomination.

Campaign finance reports now show that employees of nine major US industries — including defense, communications, health, construction and Wall Street — gave the lion’s share of their contributions to the junior senator from Illinois instead of rival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in the first three months of 2008. All of these industries favored Clinton in 2007.

Among top US industries, Clinton bested Obama only among defense contractors during one of the first months of 2008. In February, she raised $74,000 from defense employees to Obama’s $66,000. Obama beat out Clinton in March.

The figures appear in an article by Brody Mullins in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, and are drawn from the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

If anything, this should remind us that first, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, and second, that Barack Obama is a national politician.  And more importantly, Obama is constrained by the limitations of a national politician, which include no small amount of indebtness to powerful business interests (and yes, this would be the case even with someone like Dennis Kucinich).  Admittedly, Obama is probably less indebted than your average presidential candidate - when you have almost 1.5 million small donors, you don’t need to make panicked phone calls to the CEO of [insert random multinational] - but still, we shouldn’t be surprised when a President Obama gives tax breaks to sectors of the financial industry for their steadfast support*.

*Which you know, is lame.