January in a new Congress is a peculiar creation. One is very much reminded of Shakespeare’s tale: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Not that I mean to imply that newly minted Congresspersons are a bunch of idiots. But I digress.

The incoming Congressional freshmen, flavored strongly of Earl Grey, have been making a lot of noise since they descended on the nation’s capital. Sadly for them, it is simply in the nature of the beast to do a lot of roaring without much substance until after the President’s State of the Union address.

No matter how much you disagree with the President’s policies, he is still the one who sets the tone and he is still the one who signs the bills into law. Or not.

A big part of the comedy we’re all about to watch over the next couple of years involves how long it will take for those fire-breathing freshmen to notice that they don’t have a veto-proof majority. But, once again, I digress.

One of the most interesting things I’ve been watching over the last couple of weeks — and it was particularly striking last week in the days leading up to and away from the State of the Union address — is the rather odd rhetorical position occupied by America’s Small Businesses.

Politicians like to talk about us. That’s because people like us. It’s also because there was a time when politicians used to simply talk about business. That didn’t go over too well, because they made no secret about the fact that when they said “business” they meant “big business.”

These days, when they talk about small business, they still mean “big business” much of the time but they have grown too savvy to let people know that.

Either that, or they really don’t ‘get’ that there are some pretty significant differences between large firms and small firms, and that there are even some pretty significant differences between small firms and microbusinesses.

I was feeling badly about that for a little while. A decade of working to educate federal policy makers about microbusinesses, and they still don’t get it.

Then I remembered what happened last November.

See, that’s the trouble with freshman. No matter how eager they are to sink their teeth into the meaty stuff, you still have to start with the survey course.

Every single time.