Erstwhile free-market populist Pawlenty gets sucked into ‘the royal triangle greed’

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty as a presidential candidate threw barbs at “the royal triangle of greed: Big Government, Big Unions, and Big Bailed-out businesses.”
Well, now Pawlenty has become royalty himself, it seems. He’s quitting Romney’s campaign to take the helm of the Financial Services Roundtable , a downtown DC lobbying operation representing such “Big Bailed-Out Businesses as “Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and General Electric.”

Pawlenty defined himself during his brief presidential run as the closest thing a free-market populist in the field. He went to Iowa and critiqued ethanol subsidies, he lumped bailed-out businesses in with big government as an evil. He said things like “There’s a bunch of people running the country all these years from Harvard and Yale and Wall Street. You know, they screwed it up.”

But now he’s a bank lobbyist.