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.

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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Modern Warfare 2 is my addiction at this moment and I happened to stumbleupon this nice post with pictures of all the maps. Will be using this to improve my overall deadliness if that’s even possible.

Modern Warfare 2 Map Overviews

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