Friday, July 09, 2010

The smart play for Obama: go all out for small business and see where the debate leads

I’m sorry to see the White House bending to the will of the Right and Center, and going on a campaign to insist that Obama is not anti-business. This PR initiative—along with his nod to the deficit hawks—seems like a form of Clinton’s famous triangulation strategy—observe and tally up opinion numbers to see which way the wind is blowing, then say you’re for that.

Afterthought: Or maybe, as Paul Krugman says, it’s not public polling that sways the strategy, it’s news reports.

Big business has run amok—big oil, big health, big banks, but he could make a distinction that might prove interesting. It would make sense to double down on efforts you don’t hear enough about to help smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, where the real innovation and job growth comes from. Pump that up and make a big deal of it because it’s fair and smart. As a bonus it takes an arrow out of the Republicans’ quiver because the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce like to trot out the plight of small business when they really are shilling for huge business. See where they stand if a tax incentive were rolled out that dramatically favored tiny businesses and phased it down to zero at the 25th percentile of annual revenues.

By the way, the beneficiaries of help for small businesses aren’t always the smiling mom and pop retail store owners you see pictured in GOP pollster PowerPoints. I think one definition of a small business is 500 employees or less, which could be represented by a slightly different photo: a sprawling three-story complex in your average office park.