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For Bruce Josten, the feisty top lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it got personal last fall on a Sunday talk show when President Obama’s spokesman invoked his name.

“They called me out” during a White House attack on the chamber’s midterm campaign efforts, Mr. Josten recalled. Mr. Obama had his own reason to take things personally; his policies were on the receiving end of a $50 million “voter education” barrage by the chamber, the signature lobby for American business.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Bruce Josten of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sees positive signs for improved relations with the White House.

For the moment, both sides have sheathed their weapons. Mr. Obama will address the chamber on Monday as part of a postelection effort to improve relations with business and, he hopes, accelerate economic recovery.

Mr. Josten sees positive signs. The chamber cheered the bipartisan tax cut compromise that Mr. Obama reached with Republicans in the lame-duck session of Congress, the completion of a United States-South Korea trade deal and the recent appointment of William M. Daley, a former business executive, as White House chief of staff.

“The White House does deserve credit,” Mr. Josten acknowledged. But he is not yet convinced that such steps will tame what he called the “regulatory tsunami,” among other problems, enough to stir the investment and the new hiring the administration seeks.

“That’s all up in the air,” Mr. Josten concluded. “You’ve got to walk the talk.”

Narrowed Differences

Relations between corporate leaders and any Democratic president are necessarily fraught. They have different constituencies and worldviews — on the role of government, the distribution of tax burdens and the proper balance between business and labor.

In Mr. Obama’s first two years, business saw costly new health care and financial regulations and a president who denounced the “obscene” bonuses of Wall Street “fat cats.” Mr. Obama’s fellow Democrats saw an administration that eschewed bank nationalization and single-payer health care and usually chose cool pragmatism over hot populism.

Corporate leaders “feared truly punishing legislation and behavior, and in fact they never got it,” said a Democratic strategist, Jim Jordan. They complain loudly anyway, Mr. Jordan added, for the same reason that top basketball coaches like Mike Krzyzewski of Duke yell at referees: to seek advantage on the next close call.

The new political alignment of 2011 has narrowed their differences. Having achieved his principal goals on health care and financial regulation (while failing on capping carbon emissions), Mr. Obama has moved toward less polarizing priorities. And Republicans’ new strength on Capitol Hill requires that any substantive action have bipartisan support.

“Let’s set aside ideology,” said Bernadette Budde, senior vice president at the Business Industry Political Action Committee. “That’s not even the arena in which we’re going to play for the next two years.”

Export promotion, infrastructure development and support for innovation through improvements in research and education all represent goals that business shares with an administration hungry to spur investment and job creation. That agenda may also be appealing to political independents, whose impatience for results drove the swing elections of 2006, 2008 and 2010.

Pressure from those “fix-it voters,” Ms. Budde said, helps elevate the component of Mr. Obama’s leadership style that values compromise and inclusiveness.

“I think I can work with that Obama,” she concluded. “If you’re in the room, you’re going to get something.”

Wary Partners

The president of the U.S. Chamber, Thomas J. Donohue, was among the first people Gene Sperling called after Mr. Obama named him last month to head the National Economic Council. Among his goals, Mr. Sperling said, is to be “an honest broker” who makes sure “more people are included” in policy deliberations.

So far, signals like that have had their intended effect. Corporate leaders “now feel they have a partner,” said Johanna Schneider, who directs external relations at the Business Roundtable,, an association of nearly 200 leading chief executives.

That has not wiped away differences of interest or mutual suspicions. “I have no idea,” Mr. Josten said, what Mr. Obama will tell the chamber on Monday, but he pointed to several specifics that business would like to hear.

Those include a commitment to complete additional trade deals with Colombia and Panama; steps toward a fundamental overhaul of the tax code; curbs on politically delicate entitlement programs that are needed to close long-term deficits and new financing sources for Mr. Obama’s infrastructure goals. Unlike the chamber, the White House has shied away from supporting a gas tax increase.

Mr. Josten dismissed Mr. Obama’s recently announced regulatory strategy, ostensibly intended to reduce unnecessary burdens on business. “It’s a rehash of Clinton’s, which was a rehash of Carter’s,” Mr. Josten said.

Such skepticism underscores the limits of rapprochement between Mr. Obama and business organizations in Washington. Nonetheless, they must cope with one another for at least two more years, and maybe six.

“It’s their field,” Mr. Josten said of the administration. But “we’re going to be on the field.”

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Jim Young/Reuters Carl Schramm, left, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, is introduced by Steve Case, chairman of the Case Foundation, at the launch of a national campaign called Startup America.

Steve Case, the founder of AOL, will lead panel of business executives who will encourage private investment in small, entrepreneurial start-ups, the White House announced Monday.

In an interview after meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office, Mr. Case said that the effort, which is backed by the White House but is a private endeavor, is an indication that Mr. Obama and his team now understand the importance of pursuing policies that will spur growth in high-growth companies.

“The last couple of years there was not as much of a focus on the entrepreneur,” Mr. Case said of the administration. “I applaud that the president and his teams have really pivoted and made it a real commitment for the next couple of years.”

Mr. Case added:  “Hopefully, the overall focus will be on celebrating and advancing and encouraging entrepreneurship. Because that’s where the real job creation happens.”

White House officials said Mr. Case’s effort would be separate from the administration’s other efforts to enhance the government’s role in small-business development.

At an event on Monday, Gary Locke, the commerce secretary, announced Startup America, an initiative that will include an additional $2 billion in loan guarantees for small businesses and an effort by the administration to make permanent the elimination of some capital gains taxes.

The Energy Department and the Veterans Affairs Department are also beginning training and mentoring programs for people who want to start small businesses.

Mr. Case’s effort will be similar, but largely run independently of the government’s. At the White House event on Monday, Mr. Case announced that Intel, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have all agreed to invest money to help spur high-growth business development.

In the interview, he said he wanted to raise seed money for small businesses but also find ways to encourage networks of entrepreneurs to grow across the country.

“It’s building ecosystems around these entrepreneurs,” he said. “The focus is really on these high-growth companies that can go from dozens to tens to hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of employees.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill cast the effort as a gimmick by the White House.

“It seems the only thing new being offered by the White House this morning is another catch phrase,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. “Not until the administration is prepared to break down Washington barriers to job creation — onerous mandates, costly regulations and economic uncertainty resulting from massive budget deficits — will we see renewed confidence from American small-business owners.”

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Drew Angerer/The New York Times President Obama talked about American competitiveness at Forsyth Technical Community College, in Winston-Salem, N.C.

By focusing his State of the Union address on competitiveness abroad and the investment needed at home to secure it, President Obama is using storied Washington code words that have long histories and double meanings, and are — he hopes — less fraught with political baggage than the alternatives.

Aides say the broad theme of Mr. Obama’s speech will be a clarion call for a new focus on America’s ability to compete around the world. By using the language of corporate America, the president hopes to reassure those who doubt he is business friendly, but to do so without alienating his core supporters.

The phrase “American competitiveness” is hardly new, and it is definitely not an invention of Mr. Obama’s Democratic Party.

In fact, for decades the phrase was the intellectual property of Republican administrations, which used it as a way of signaling their desire to reduce regulatory burdens on business and pave the way to higher profits for corporations struggling to compete with companies in other countries.

In 1981, Vice President George Bush called for “strong necessary steps to restore our competitiveness with other nations,” as he proposed to do away with environmental and highway safety regulations that he said hampered the American auto industry.

When Mr. Bush became president, his vice president, Dan Quayle, headed a council on competitiveness inside the White House until it was attacked by Democrats as a cover for antiregulatory efforts, defunded in Congress and finally eliminated altogether by President Bill Clinton early in his first term.

In a statement by Vice President Al Gore, the Clinton administration said at the time that they were “sending a clear message to the special interests who used the Council on Competitiveness as a back door to avoid the law. That back door is closed.” Mr. Gore said the “Council on Competitiveness was founded on a false choice, that the interests of workers, consumers and the environment conflict with the goal of economic growth.”

But Mr. Clinton’s White House did not discard the phrase. Rather, the president appropriated it as a new, global justification for the kind of policies he wanted to push through the Congress. In a 1993 speech urging passage of his health care plan, Mr. Clinton argued that revamping the health care system was necessary because of the impact it would have on the nation’s ability to compete around the world.

“Our competitiveness, our whole economy, the integrity of the way the government works and, ultimately, our living standards depend upon our ability to achieve savings without harming the quality of health care,” Mr. Clinton said. Competitiveness under Mr. Clinton harked back to the Sputnik era, when the space race spurred federal spending, fueled by a nationalistic, us-versus-them fervor.

Mr. Clinton also harnessed the power of competition to argue for his trade policies. On the day he signed the North American Free Trade Act into law, Mr. Clinton said: “We cannot stop global change. We cannot repeal the international economic competition that is everywhere. We can only harness the energy to our benefit.”

The question now is what Mr. Obama intends when he uses that phrase.

Labor unions worry that the president is trying to signal a rapprochement with business — a fear that grew when Mr. Obama last week announced a government-wide review of unneeded regulations. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Obama wrote that such a review was needed “to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.”

When Mr. Obama talks about competitiveness, it resonates with business groups that had become suspicious of the president’s commitment to private industry after his efforts to reform Wall Street. It is part of a realignment of Mr. Obama’s White House that has included the hiring of William M. Daley as chief of staff. And it is a shield against critics who accuse Mr. Obama of having an antibusiness policy agenda.

But Mr. Obama’s White House also appears to be leaning toward Mr. Clinton’s use of the phrase — a justification for the president’s approach to education and infrastructure spending that he says is necessary to compete with China and other rapidly growing economies.

And Mr. Obama is not likely to use the phrase “government spending” to describe what he wants. Instead, he is likely to focus on what he calls “investments” in America’s future.

Like competitiveness, that phrase has a long history in presidential communication. Often, it has become a favorite euphemism for Democratic politicians seeking to increase federal spending without raising the specter of negative implications for the nation’s long-term debt.

Mr. Clinton used the phrase repeatedly, starting in his inaugural address, when he called for the country to “invest more in our own people, in their jobs, and in their future, and at the same time cut our massive debt.”

And Mr. Obama has used it repeatedly during his presidency, often as a way of promising federal spending on his priorities. In a June speech last year at Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Obama described his broad economic policy.

“It’s a foundation based on investments in our people and their future; investments in the skills and education we need to compete,” he said. “Investments in a 21st century infrastructure for America, from high-speed railroads to high-speed Internet; investments in research and technology, like clean energy, that can lead to new jobs and new exports and new industries.”

That message is exactly what worries conservatives, who say Mr. Obama could just as easily substitute “spending” for “investment” in that paragraph.

“With all due respect to our Democratic friends, any time they want to spend, they call it investment, so I think you will hear the president talk about investing a lot Tuesday night,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

An aide to Mr. McConnell summed up his boss’s feelings in a Twitter message later, quoting the senator as saying, “Investment is a Latin term for more Washington spending.”

Until Mr. Obama speaks on Tuesday night, people like Mr. McConnell will be left to wonder how the president intends to use phrases like “competitiveness” and “investment.” And then everyone can start trying to interpret what he meant.

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Mike Segar/Reuters Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, speaks to protestors at the “Main Street to Wall Street” rally in New York, April 29, 2010.

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, says Washington politicians are living in an “Alice in Wonderland political climate” that ignores the needs of workers struggling to survive in a difficult economy.

The sharp-edged remarks are part of a speech Mr. Trumka is scheduled to give Wednesday morning that is designed to push back against the policies of Republican lawmakers who seized control of the House in last year’s elections. It is also a goad to President Obama, whose administration has recently seemed eager to court the business community.

The speech will help to set the tone of a debate that is likely to intensify as business and labor groups verbally clash during the 2012 presidential campaign.

“So let me get this straight,” Mr. Trumka says, according to excerpts of remarks obtained by The Caucus. “We need to slash retirement and health benefits for the elderly because we are on the brink of fiscal crisis — but we can afford to squander hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the super-rich? Only at the Mad Hatter’s tea party does this make sense.”

The AFL-CIO and other unions spent tens of millions of dollars during the 2010 midterm elections to make the case for Democratic candidates. But most of those candidates ended up losing in a political wave that swept in many lawmakers backed by the increasingly influential Tea Party movement.

Mr. Trumka plans to say the elections were “fundamentally about jobs” and predicts the 2012 campaign will feature the same concerns among voters.

“People who live in Wonderland may not have noticed, but there is a lot of work to be done here,” he will say in the speech. “We have let our transnational business titans convince our politicians that our national strength lies in their profits, not our jobs.”

The speech stands in stark contrast to one given last week by Mr. Trumka’s arch-rival, Tom Donohue, the president and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce. In that speech, Mr. Donohue said the economic problems that remain are the regulatory and policy impediments to business growth.

“We must make our domestic economy more attractive to global investors, job creators and startup entrepreneurs by clearing away the impediments that are causing them to sit on their capital or invest it outside of the United States,” Mr. Donohue said. “And we must do right for future generations and our economy by beginning a serious effort to cut runaway spending, reform entitlements, and bring government deficits and debt under control.”

The two organizations run by Mr. Trumka and Mr. Donohue are physically located near each other — both facing the White House on the edge of Lafayette Park, separated by only a single city block.

But their constituencies, message and style could not be more different. And while Washington politicians search for ways to tone down their harsh rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shootings, the two men are unlikely to hold much back.

Mr. Trumka was a coal miner. Mr. Donohue spent 13 years representing the interest of trucking companies. Both are aggressive to a fault. And both are at the helm of organizations which are likely to have millions of dollars at their disposal.

The chamber, officially, will not take sides in the presidential election, although Mr. Donohue’s dislike for many of Mr. Obama’s policies is no secret. And Mr. Donohue has made it clear the group will be very active in pursuing Republican control of the Senate in 2012.

“The chamber will vigorously defend the rights of companies and the associations that represent them to lobby, to petition the government and to fully participate in the political and policy debates that will shape the future of our country,” Mr. Donohue said last week. “We will not allow the business community to be intimidated and we will use every tool at our disposal to challenge those who try to silence our voice.”

But Mr. Trumka is just as determined to make sure that the voice of the worker is also heard.

In his speech Wednesday, he accuses politicians in Washington and across the country of “attacking the very idea of the American middle class — the idea that in America economic security — health care, a real pension, a wage that can pay for college — is not something for a privileged few, but rather what all of us can earn in exchange for a hard day’s work.”

Next week, President Obama is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address in front of a congress with newly energized Republican members. The president has already hinted that he will seek compromise and accommodation with the Republican leaders of the House.

In a statement ahead of the House vote to repeal his health care overhaul, Mr. Obama said: “I’m willing and eager to work with both Democrats and Republicans to improve the Affordable Care Act. But we can’t go backward.”

Mr. Trumka plans to say that the country’s labor movement is eager for “a call to action” by the president on behalf of workers.

“We are ready for vision, and we believe in the President’s vision of a nation that is strong because we are just and true to our values,” Trumka will say. “A vision for a national future founded on the profound truth that social justice and material prosperity are not competing values — they are necessary to each other.”

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President Obama, intensifying his courtship of the business community, announced Tuesday that he is issuing an executive order that aims to free companies of unnecessary regulatory burdens and promote economic growth.

In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Obama said he is ordering a government-wide review of the rules that govern business, in an effort to remove “outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.’’ He said his administration is committed to seeking the ‘’proper balance’’ between freedom of commerce and regulations necessary to protect the public against threats to health and safety.

The White House said the order has been signed. It comes as the Obama administration has been trying to smooth frayed ties with business leaders, which were strained last year during the debates over health care and financial regulatory reform. Mr. Obama has already taken a series of steps to reach out to business leaders; his new chief of staff, Bill Daley, has a background as a banker and former secretary of commerce to President Bill Clinton. And the president is planning a speech to the Chamber of Commerce on February 7.

“From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy,’’ Mr. Obama wrote.

“Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences,’’ the president went on. “Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.’’

Mr. Obama said the executive order will make clear that striking the right balance is the “operating principle’ of his administration. He said it orders a government-wide review of rules already on the books, a review that, he wrote, “will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests.’’

The president said he wants rules to be written with more input from “experts businesses and ordinary citizens,’’ in an effort to give “careful consideration to benefits and costs’’ of such regulations.

“Small firms drive growth and create most new jobs in this country,’’ the president said.
“We need to make sure nothing stands in their way. ‘’

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BALTIMORE — House Republicans are gathered here for a policy retreat that amounts to hitting the reset button for their new majority after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson last week.

The rampage last Saturday, which left 6 dead and 14 wounded, including Ms. Giffords, has consumed the Congressional agenda since then and interrupted the early days of the new Republican governing majority as it tried to put its stamp on the House.

But as they prepare to try to restore some semblance of routine to Congressional business next week, House Republicans say they are ready to get back to work and move ahead with their drive to substantially cut federal spending and reverse the Democratic initiatives of the past two years.

“We are going to try to get our economy back on track,” Representative Candice Miller of Michigan told reporters.

Aides said more than 200 members of the new Republican majority — about a third of whom are new to Congress — are gathered at the Marriott Waterfront here for a series of brainstorming sessions, speeches by prominent Republicans and other events intended to get the lawmakers more familiar with one another and energized for the coming months.

A prime topic so far has been a looming vote on raising the federal debt ceiling — a vote that is anathema to many of the Republican newcomers with Tea Party backing who expressly opposed more federal debt in their campaigns. Republican leaders indicated that they were spending considerable time talking to lawmakers about the vote ahead and conditions that might be attached to win approval.

“We obviously want to be able to use that as leverage to make sure that President Obama and the majority in the Senate understand that we would never agree to do such a thing unless there was a huge amount of spending decrease,” Ms. Miller said.

Another topic getting some attention at the three-day session that ends Saturday is the idea of the two parties mingling in their seats in the House for the State of the Union address on Jan. 25, rather than sitting strictly by party as is as customary.

Republicans noted that there have never been seating assignments at the session and that they would entertain the idea.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 House Republican as the whip, said he would enjoy watching the speech next to Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat.

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