Obama Finally Sends Small Biz A Sign
Mar 23rd, 2009 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: Politics & PolicyConsidering 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, it caused most of the American public to barely register how the President was making nice to small businesses last Monday — much to the Administration’s chagrin. As White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel said in a weekend interview, “It got in the way for everybody.”
Not that the President did anything particularly earth-shattering. On top of what was already in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama Administration is now planning to make good on a longstanding promise from before he took office to designate TARP funds to specifically address liquidity issues in the small business loan market. Nice stuff, particularly for employers, and the President’s language during its announcement was as stirring as we’ve come to expect from him. But for all the stirring words, President Obama’s apparent understanding of microbusinesses has not yet extended beyond rhetoric into policy. It seems probable that President Obama has been counting on his SBA Administrator for that, but Karen Gordon Mills is still MIA with no further word on her ETA. And that matters quite a lot because, until an SBA Administrator fully integrates Small Business into the President’s Grand Recovery Plan, there’s no reason to suppose that plan is going to work.
