Issue of the week: Obama enters the lion’s den

Don’t blame the February air for the chill inside the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s main hall this week, said Nina Easton in Fortune.com. President Obama was in the house, addressing the “business group he had vilified over the past year.” He made a stab at humor, saying he wished he had brought a fruitcake. But the quip was telling: “A fruitcake is a notoriously impersonal gesture,” handed out without much concern for “whether the recipient will even like the thing.” The speech seemed written and delivered in a similar spirit. In remarks interrupted all of twice by applause, Obama reiterated his case for regulation and “his much-dreaded health-care reform,” called on executives to step up hiring and pay themselves less, and “argued that industry should follow his lead.” What he didn’t do was convince those in attendance that he’s “really on their side.”

As usual, Obama said one thing and meant another, said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. When he asked business to work with government, it sounded like his calls for bipartisanship, which amount to asking Republicans to fold. And though he talked a good game on regulation, “his administration has imposed, perpetuated, or proposed a knotty web of job- and commerce-killing regulations.” The whole speech bristled with subtext, said Jeanne Cummings in Politico.com. When Obama said he wouldn’t have pushed through a huge stimulus program “under normal circumstances,” he was imploring business not to judge him by the first two years of his administration, when he was grappling with an economic crisis. When he thanked the Chamber for “pushing Congress to make more infrastructure investments,” he was asking business to defy the Tea Party and “support new spending” on roads, broadband Internet access, and high-speed rail. And when he exhorted attendees to hire more Americans, he was confessing his fear that the economy won’t start adding jobs by the time his re-election campaign is under way.

Maybe business executives are right, said Robert Reich in The Christian Science Monitor. Maybe Obama really doesn’t understand them. He argued at the Chamber that businesses can boost their long-term profits by hiring more Americans—without seeming to realize that “American businesses are doing quite nicely as it is,” with low payrolls boosting their bottom lines. Why should businesses screw up a good thing by hiring high-priced Americans instead of cheap labor overseas? I understand why Obama needed to make nice to business, said Derrick Jackson in The Boston Globe. But while he spoke, his staff was readying deep cuts in programs that benefit the poor and the planet. Does wooing business require him to “abandon the poor or the environment in the process”?

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