Obama And Business: Julianna Goldman On Her Interview With The President

President Obama's rhetoric on business has shifted a bit since the fall of 2008. Back then, he was depicting John McCain's tax plan as too corporate-friendly; now, Obama says he's run a pro-business agenda as president, according to Bloomberg's Julianna Goldman.

Goldman's story yesterday that President Obama doesn't "begrudge" multimillion-dollar bonuses for Wall Street execs, based on an Oval Office interview (more of which will come out Friday in Business Week), caught some eyes around the Web, and not without good reason: Obama ran a populist campaign against "golden parachutes" and overseas tax loopholes and insisted on restricting CEO pay as the succession of federal bailouts unfolded during the '08 presidential race, culminating in TARP (see this ad, hitting McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina, now running for Senate in California for her pay-out as CEO of Hewlett-Packard).


Obama "trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies," Goldman and Ian Katz wrote.

Goldman explains that Obama is trying to change the perception that he's anti-business. (Note: the president will speak to Business Roundtable, a top business group, in DC Feb. 24.)

"The president said he has driven a fundamentally pro business agenda, and as one of the examples he gave, he said that by the end of this year he plans to sign some $70 billion worth of corporate tax credits," Goldman says about her interview: