I don’t mean that you can have the same kind and quality of influence as the corporate giants who fill the campaign coffers of politicians, directly or indirectly.

I mean that you can have influence because of something it won’t take you a second to understand: relationships.

The relationships you develop with your elected representatives and their staff can accomplish a great deal, if you give them sufficient time and attention.

Last night, I was a guest on Blog Talk Radio’s Coach for Innovation with Dee McCrory. The subject under discussion was microbusinesses and jobs and the future of the American workplace.

Dee and I talked for an hour. We could easily have talked for two. It’s a big subject.

I’ve been writing about that subject here and everywhere else I write for a long time. Lately, it’s been a regular topic.

This new recession is a really deep one, resulting in unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed putting an unprecedented strain on that system of social safety nets I was talking about last week.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the article.

Nobody knows how long it’ll be before the jobs return but it’s pretty clear that what we’re doing right now — lurching along with these costly, last-minute extensions of unemployment insurance — is unsustainable.

Judging from this week’s news, you have to ask yourself if our nation’s leaders will, without possessing the vestige of a clue, end up destroying what they have not the wit to appreciate.

I’m talking about those proposed rules targeting firms and individuals (but mostly firms) that hire independent contractors.

Now, although this proposal is said to be a part of the President’s budget (and it is), it was actually proposed jointly by the Departments of Labor and the Treasury, and their respective Secretaries, Hilda Solis and Tim Geithner. They illustrate that mid-20th century political philosophies also are a poor fit for the way microbusinesses do business.

That is why it is sometimes said, among us microbusiness advocate types, that a small business with 40 employees has a lot more in common with a “small business” that has 400 employees than it does with a small business that has 4 employees.

The 4-person business, the microbusiness, is just too small to even have the option of approximating something like a large business. So, it’s owner has two options: grow enough to “fit in” or thumb your nose at all that and figure out something else.

Over the last twenty years or so, increasing numbers of microbusinesses have chosen to explore what’s behind Door Number Two.

We all know that it is not rational to expect the economy to go straight from ‘ew’ to awe in less than a month. And, while it might make sense to assume that things will be better in December 2010 than they were in January 2010, it will still take some time to get there.

So, while you are listening to various folks with various sorts of axes to grind, bear in mind that things are neither uniformly wonderful nor frighteningly terrible. It isn’t necessary to find deep meaning or predictive value in any particular set of tea-leaf substitutes.

Right now, it is what it is.

In some ways, it’s probably a good thing that the government doesn’t seem to have noticed any of this yet. If they had, they would almost certainly have decided to regulate it in some way, under the mistaken notion that all those poor freelancers need to be protected … whether they want to be protected or not.

At the same time, this new labor market movement could use some support — especially in this economy.

Part of the reason why they don’t know what to do is because the economy is not behaving the way it used to and nobody has appeared before them to explain how it is behaving now because nobody really knows.

Besides the incentives provided by campaign donations, lawmakers like to tinker with big companies at times like this because the big companies haven’t changed. They remain familiar and the lawmakers understand them.

The things they are doing for small businesses are only helping a small number of them because only a small number of them are still doing business in 20th century ways. They don’t know how we operate anymore and there aren’t enough of them who do their own tweeting for us to explain it to them.

New Year’s Day is all about clean slates and fresh starts. No matter how gruesome the previous year was, once it’s over, it becomes easier to point your face toward tomorrow with a renewed sense of possibility.

Of course, if you think about that objectively, it doesn’t really make much sense, does it?

The economy was a mess throughout 2009 and I would bet that none of the macroeconomic indicators suddenly did an about-face on December 31st, such as would justify unbridled optimism now.

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.