Behind the war between Obama and big business

    But the danger for the White House in going after corporate bigwigs too aggressively, Kessler said, is that Americans are still fundamentally pro-business. A recent survey his group commissioned from Benenson Strategy Group, Obama's campaign pollster, found 63% of Americans think "most American companies value their employees and treat them well." A minority felt large companies have too much power and hurt the middle class -- and a majority believe the private sector, rather than the government, will be the engine of the economic recovery.

    Some of the short-term political fallout for Democrats is already evident. The party's fundraising from major Wall Street donors has fallen off a cliff, with collections out of New York down 65% since two years ago, according to a recent Washington Post report. Many of those donors now sitting on their wallets had been important boosters for Obama in his campaign -- like J.P Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) CEO Jamie Dimon, who has cut off donations to the Democratic party committees and written a check to Mark Kirk, the Illinois Republican seeking Obama's old Senate seat.

    The disconnect with Wall Street, in particular, was brought into fresh relief this week as Obama traveled up to New York on Wednesday for back-to-back fundraisers. Both high-dollar events -- one at the Greenwich Village home of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, the other at the Four Seasons Hotel -- sold out, according to the Wall Street Journal. But a Democratic fundraiser told the paper that anger toward Democrats among financial services executives will limit repeat engagements in town -- and that Wall Street types asked to attend the events this week were either uninterested or only wanted to come so they could complain to the President.

    How will Obama fix this problem? Jeffrey Garten, a professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management, said he thinks the administration "is going to try to meet these guys halfway, because it's genuinely concerned that the sour attitude will translate into a lack of investment." Obama has already signaled he wants to get moving on stalled trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

    "It's going to be better in the short term," predicted Garten, author of "The Mind of the CEO." "He'll bring in one or two business leaders into the administration, if he can find them. And he'll try to cut a deal in which the rhetoric stops, and he finds some things that both he and the business community can say they're going to go forward on, on a congenial basis."