Meanwhile, everywhere else you look — whether it is at social safety nets or whether it is at a National Broadband Plan or whether it is at the push to increase U.S. exports — there appears to be no place in Obamaland for the sturdy American microbusiness.

In many ways, that really doesn’t matter.

Microbusinesses have managed to grow in number and increasing importance in the U.S. economy without a shred of support from the federal government and I would imagine they will continue to do so.

On the other hand, I’ll confess I’m disappointed.

Whatever your party affiliation, I would like to think that most Americans were proud to witness a true Moment in U.S. history, when our first African-American president was sworn into office.

I don’t know about you but I never for an instant thought that would happen during my lifetime.

There are those who would say that it all went downhill from there. Some of them have problems with our new President on basics of political philosophy, while others were simply disappointed when they discovered that Mr. Obama really couldn’t part the Potomac with a wave of his hand.

From a practical point of view, I have grown increasingly encouraged as the year has progressed.

President Obama, hailed back in February as a savior simply because he was ‘saving’ us from a bad case of Bush Fatigue, is now learning what it’s like when the honeymoon is over.

He certainly deserves credit for refusing to do what his predecessors have done: take one look at health care reform and run screaming from the room. This has to be one of the most thankless tasks in the universe.

Various groups complain and release studies and demand action. Then, when some brave politician comes along and proposes said action, people see change bearing down on them, freak out, and then they run screaming from the room.

If you stop to think about it, it’s rather astonishing to reflect that it was back in 1993 that newly sworn-in President William Jefferson Clinton vowed to fix health care and provide coverage for everybody in the country. The rest, as they say, is history. It is now sixteen years later and we have the [...]

We are now roughly thirteen weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama and already the President has a fairly huge looming problem - that is, President Obama’s incipient small business problem. Once again, a new president was elected amid very high expectations by small business owners of real concern about our issues and, once again, [...]

Considering the fact that the small business community has been waiting for a substantive policy nod from President Obama since Inauguration Day, it’s too bad that the AIG story broke when it did. For a week, AIG and its bonus payments were pretty much all the media wanted to talk about. And, because of that, [...]

Last week, President Obama made his first address before a joint session of Congress that was not, technically, a State of the Union address but that was, in every other way, a State of the Union Address. That was when we learned something else about our new President. We learned that, as president, Obama has [...]

When it comes to reassuring the nation’s microbusinesses that the days of being ignored are over, this recovery package certainly didn’t get it done.

Of course, it’s still early days yet. Mr. O is only one month into his term of office, after all. He still has lots and lots of time to make good.

On the other hand, he’s not going to get an entire four years for this, either.