Try to mess with farm subsidies in Washington, and Senators Daschle and Harkin will stand in your way. Try to take on the textile industry, and you’ve got Senator Hollings to reckon with. Even Senator Kennedy has been known to take a break from obstructing judicial nominees to do some heavy lifting now and then on behalf of Massachusetts fishermen, even lobstermen.

What a contrast with the showing local industry gets from the delegation from New York. Witness the reaction — or the lack thereof — to the assault that Senators Grassley and Baucus are preparing on the hedge fund industry. Suddenly our local senators, Hillary Clinton and Chas. Schumer, seem to be meek as mice. The hedge fund industry, with an estimated $600 billion under management, is a big part of the New York City and Greenwich, Conn., economies. The Grassley-Baucus effort to tax management fees that the fund managers were able to let accumulate in offshore funds amounts to a tax increase for hedge fund managers. In the long run, the change would mean less money in the New York economy and more money shipped through Washington to states that are less productive economically.

Somehow we doubt that Messrs. Grassley and Baucus would be up to this if there were a lot of hedge funds in their home states of, respectively, Iowa and Montana. Senators Schumer and Clinton aren’t normally shy, certainly not in efforts to raise political cash from hedge fund managers and their investors. Maybe their addiction to tax-the-rich ideology is such that they won’t even look out for the interest of local industry. When corn-belt congressmen coming target our town, their cry is “Tread on us.”