Obama skips criticism of U.S. Chamber's politicking

President Obama avoided on Monday some of the sharp criticism of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce he voiced in the 2010 campaign, during a speech at the business lobby's headquarters this morning.

Notably absent from the president's speech were the barbs he leveled last fall toward the Chamber's political activity, largely in support of Republicans and in opposition to Democrats.

Obama focused instead on areas of common cause with the business group, including spending on education, research and infrastructure, as well as pursuing corporate tax reform and consolidating the federal government.

The president's speech at the Chamber's headquarters just across Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., had been framed as an opportunity to cool the tensions that had plagued the relationship between the White House and the Chamber over the past two years.

Obama did make an indirect reference to the bumpy relationship the two had suffered at the top of his remarks.

"I’m here in the interest of being more neighborly. Maybe we would have gotten off on a better foot if I had brought over a fruitcake when we first moved in," the president joked.

Hostilities between Obama and the Chamber reached their apex at the height of the 2010 campaign last fall, when Obama picked up on an argument that the Chamber and other GOP-oriented groups could be spending foreign dollars on their electoral activities, which would violate election laws. The Chamber vehemently denied those claims by Democrats, and proceeded to spend $33 million on the 2010 elections.

Obama made no mention of the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that freed up the Chamber and labor groups to spend more heavily in last year's elections. The president had called at the time for new campaign finance regulations, outlined in the Disclose Act, to force groups like the Chamber to disclose more information about their funding and political spending. That legislation was ultimately unsuccessful, though, and the 2012 cycle is already under way absent the disclosure regulations the president had sought.