After enduring torments in George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith learnt to love Big Brother. After the midterm elections, which are also likely to be painful, Barack Obama should learn to love big business.

The US president, a former community organiser in Chicago whose formative professional experience was helping the dispossessed after steel companies and manufacturers left town, has never shown affection or sympathy for US multinationals. One of his favourite jabs at Republicans is that they seek tax breaks for corporations "to ship jobs overseas".

The president occupies a Manichean world in which small business is worthy and big business suspicious. Almost as often as he praises Main Street and denounces Wall Street speculators, he proclaims enthusiasm for small and medium-sized employers while disdaining or berating global enterprises.

The suspicion is mutual. Two years ago, many chief executives enthused about Mr Obama's pragmatism and intelligence but that has changed. Leaders such as Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon have complained about his rhetoric and his administration's regulatory and trade policies.

Mr Obama has to bridge this gulf, and may be nudged into doing so by Republican gains in the midterm elections next week. It is not only bad politics to provoke such an ill-tempered split with companies that can help to create the new jobs the economy needs, but bad policy.

The president does not like bankers much, and has no reason to, given that some of the Democrats' political troubles come from taking responsibility for the unpopular troubled asset relief programme. But rather than halting there, he has also treated multinationals - particularly energy companies and those with manufacturing plants overseas - as cartoon villains.

The rhetoric has escalated on the other side, with the US Chamber of Commerce complaining that the White House and Congress have "vilified industries while embarking on an ill-advised course of government expansion, major tax increases, massive deficits and job-destroying regulations".

David Fuller's view I agree with this column and commend it to all of you for its overall relevance to governance.

I have felt for some time that the USA needed a wise economic supremo. Interesting, John Gapper mentions: "There are signs that the White House would like to recruit an experienced business leader to the cabinet (ideally Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City)."

That would make sense and presumably also eliminate any chance of Bloomberg running for president in 2012, possibly as an independent candidate as some have suggested. His biographer says it won't happen.


Third party candidates tend to be quixotic, as the super-smart New York Mayor will certainly know. Is there no chance that the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, would be capable of nominating Bloomberg as its presidential candidate for 2012?