Zuckerman – “Obama White House Most Hostile Administration To Big Business In Decades”

In so many speeches he’s given, he’s always railing against “greedy” corporations and business men and engaged in class warfare rhetoric.

Politico:

The White House has launched a coordinated campaign to push back against the perception taking hold in corporate America and on Wall Street that President Barack Obama is promoting an anti-business agenda.

Obama has been happy to be seen by voters as cracking down on Wall Street but those efforts have had an unintended result: feeding a sense that the president and his party are indifferent or even actively hostile toward big business, whether those businesses are Silicon Valley tech companies, Midwestern manufacturers or Main Street small businesses.

And it is more than just politics: Obama’s aides believe confidence in the general direction of White House policy has an effect on the willingness of corporations to hire, invest and push the economy toward a more solid recovery.

The stakes are high. Nearly every economic report suggests that corporate America, flush with cash and generating strong profits, is waiting to unleash a wave of hiring if only they have confidence there will be no double-dip recession and that consumers will have money to spend.

So the White House has launched a campaign to help instill that confidence, highlighted by Obama’s remarks on Wednesday stressing his commitment to lifting trade barriers as a way to spur economic growth. That was followed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s interview on CNBC’s “Kudlow Report” last night — following his spot on PBS’ “NewsHour” on Tuesday. Obama talked up the economy in Missouri Thursday as well.

In a Thursday interview, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argued that rather than recoiling against Obama, business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a half-dozen counts: his advocacy of greater international trade and education reform open markets despite union skepticism; his rejection of calls from some quarters to nationalize banks during the financial meltdown; the rescue of the automobile industry; the fact that the overhaul of health care preserved the private delivery system; the fact that billions in the stimulus package benefited business with lucrative new contracts, and that financial regulation reform will take away the uncertainty that existed with a broken, pre-crash regulatory apparatus.

But, in the White House view, some business leaders listen only to Obama speeches being tough on BP or on the excesses of Wall Street and assume Obama is hostile to business across the board. “Rather than respond to atmospherics, they should look at policies where we have been supportive,” Emanuel said.

Within the West Wing, there are mixed feelings about the hostility many in business feel toward Obama. In some moods, aides are disdainful of what they perceive as the whininess of many business leaders, who they feel are reacting to sensible and comparatively modest ideas as though they were an intolerable burden, and as though the massive financial meltdown would not prompt a reappraisal of the business-knows-best mindset that prevailed during the Bush years.

But these same aides also take the business backlash seriously as both a political and substantive problem. A lack of business confidence, they fear, may inhibit the recovery. Emanuel has warned colleagues of this spring’s “G factor”—a convergence of bad news from the Gulf Coast oil spill, Greece’s financial problems, Germany’s agitating for fiscal austerity at a time when demand in Europe’s economy remains weak, and a new season of political instability in Gaza—has spooked many business leaders at a time when they were otherwise ready to hire and invest.

Still, the administration has a good deal of work to do to reverse opinion among the corporate elite.

Wall Street executives feel burned mostly by the “fat cat” rhetoric employed by the White House to push financial reform. They also do not like many elements of the Dodd-Frank bill, though it did not turn out to be as bad as once feared.

Other major corporate titans have also slammed the White House recently.

At a recent dinner in Rome, Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, said “business did not like the U.S. president and the president did not like business,” according to an account in the Financial Times. G.E. subsequently took the extraordinary step of saying said Mr. Immelt’s remarks “do not represent our views.”

Immelt also spoke about the generally sour mood among corporate America towards the economy and government policy: “People are in a really bad mood [in the U.S.],” he said. “We [the U.S.] are a pathetic exporter. … We have to become an industrial powerhouse again, but you don’t do this when government and entrepreneurs are not in sync.”

Verizon Communications Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg, head of the influential Business Roundtable, slammed the administration in a recent speech in Washington.

The Business Roundtable, which includes CEOs of the biggest companies in the U.S., has had ongoing contact with the White House, and Seidenberg’s comments were widely interpreted as indicating a major schism between corporate America and the West Wing.

In his speech, Seidenberg said he had been invited to the White House 16 times but that the administration was not focused on job growth and was instead “trying to micromanage industries.”

He called the U.S. corporate tax code a “major impediment to international competitiveness” and described the U.S. as a “fly-over zone” on world trade. He added that financial reform went a “step too far.”

The latest themes from Geithner and the White House appear to be direct responses to the major complaints from Immelt and Seidenberg on trade policy and corporate taxation. That is no accident. And the success of the White House effort to shift the perception of corporate America could determine the direction of the economic recovery and the fate of Democrats this fall.

Obama administration officials also are quick to point out that Corporate America hasn’t done so badly under Obama — according to the most recent data, corporate profits are up 34 percent from first quarter 2009 to first quarter 2010.

Geithner stressed on Kudlow that the administration hopes to keep the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends at 20 percent and said that the White House is generally pro-business and does not believe the government can drive the economy.

“We have a pro-growth agenda,” he said. “Part of the agenda is growing exports. They’re central to our future. … [W]e’re going to be committed to making sure we’re that we’re expanding opportunities for American business everywhere.”

Geithner added, “Now, this president understands deeply that governments don’t create jobs, businesses create jobs. And our job as government is to try to make sure we’re creating the conditions that allow businesses to prosper so they can hire people back, get this economy going again.”

During Obama’s trip to Missouri, White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton defended Obama’s record, saying the White House would not relent on its agenda on financial reform, ending corporate tax “loopholes” and other issues the business community might not like.

“Are we going to agree with the business community on every single issue? No,” Burton said. “But the president came into office saying that he was going to do some very specific things, like financial regulatory reform, which he talked about repeatedly on the campaign trail. He said he was going to close loopholes for overseas investments.”

Burton added, “And so maybe those things aren’t always going to be popular with business, but if you look at where we were and where we are now, the president has made progress on the economy. He has brought us to a place where the economy is growing, where jobs are being created, as opposed to losing 700,000 a month like we were when we came into office. But there are going to be times when we disagree, and that’s fine.”