Honestly, though, when it came to President Obama and the Chamber of Commerce it was always, if you’ll pardon the pun, just business. He needed to come up with a believable villain for the over-educated, would-be elitist rubes that makes up the other half of his current coalition; and since said rubes hate business with the kind of baffled resentment that you’d expect from a band of Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers facing an electrified fence, the CoC was perfect. Well, not perfect, given that the demonizing project didn’t actually work, but the amped-up rhetoric and funding probably saved the Democrats a House seat or two.
But that was then, this is now, and Obama’s going to make nice with the Chamber of Commerce in January. Not that the CoC is going to put too many screws in, given that a). Presidents have quite a bit of executive and regulatory power when it comes to business issues and b). the CoC retains an interest in remaining an independent player. The latter reason is probably the more important one; after all, the recent history of the Democratic party reads as practically a how-to manual on the best way to geld special interest groups which rely too heavily on one political party for power. No sane group wants to emulate the fates of the NAACP, NOW, or MoveOn.org…
Moe Lane