SPECULATION that Barack Obama will appoint a businessman to a senior job in his administration reached fever pitch this week, after the White House announced that Larry Summers, the president's principal economic adviser, will soon step down. It is hard to find an American boss nowadays with a good word to say about the current administration, and the absence of anyone with a business background in Mr Obama's inner circle is invariably mentioned as a reason why. The perception in corporate America that the president is actively anti-business, or at the very least doesn't “get it”, has started to “have a psychological effect on how firms invest”, notes one well-informed insider, who used to see this as a “seven out of ten problem” but now rates it as a ten.

Discontent that started as mostly private grumbling not long after Mr Obama entered the White House has recently gone public. Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon, a telecoms giant, used a recent speech in Washington, DC, to accuse the president of creating an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation”, claiming that the administration's regulatory expansion into “every sector of economic life” is making it “harder to raise capital and create new businesses.” Jeff Immelt, the boss of GE, has said that the administration is not in sync with entrepreneurs. The US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobby, has complained that the Obama administration has “vilified industries”.

And so it goes on. The Business Roundtable, another influential trade association, has published a 49-page list of current policies which, it claims, inhibit economic growth. Last month Dan Loeb, a hedge-fund manager who is famous for writing intemperate letters to company bosses, circulated a letter accusing Mr Obama of, in effect, undermining free-market capitalism and the rule of law. What stings most is that Mr Loeb is a former classmate of the president's and was a big donor to his election campaign.

Scary stuff. Yet does Mr Obama really have a case to answer? Certainly, some of the wilder allegations by some businesspeople should never have left the 19th hole. Mr Obama has consistently made it clear he favours a mixed capitalist economy. The big incursion of the state into finance took place on his Republican predecessor's watch. And although he doubtless went further than a McCain administration would have done to help GM and Chrysler survive, he has stuck to his pledge to return them quickly to private ownership. He used this year's state-of-the-union message to commit himself to helping corporate America double its exports, and has appointed a council to propose ideas for promoting more innovation (though, says one member, “The administration is doing more talking than listening, and several of us are already worried we've been suckered into a PR exercise.”)

Moreover, the main reason so many American bosses are down in the dumps is the sluggish economy. Mr Obama inherited the recession from his predecessor, and the economy has recovered, somewhat, since then. Besides, it was corporate America, in the shape of the Wall Street banks, that was largely to blame for the depth of the recession. It might have helped Mr Obama's relationship with business if he had gone on less about “shameful bonuses” on Wall Street; but some shame was surely in order.

Even a Republican administration would have been obliged to reform financial regulation, and, though there is a lot to quibble with in the Dodd-Frank act, the administration responded to requests from Wall Street to kill some of the more alarming reform proposals from Democrats in Congress. One way it did this was to punt the proposals on to regulators for their consideration—which is why business is now able to complain about its “uncertainty” over what the full impact of Dodd-Frank will be. Mr Obama might reply that uncertainty is preferable to the alternatives that were considered by Congress.

Uncertainty is a common charge from complaining businesspeople. According to one senior White House official, it is “shorthand for ‘We don't like health-care reform, don't like Dodd-Frank, don't want our taxes to go up'.” On taxes, the administration points out that even allowing all the Bush tax cuts to expire would return tax rates only to what they were under Bill Clinton, which was hardly a terrible time for business. There is also a nasty, mostly inherited, fiscal problem which business leaders agree needs solving. It will require deep spending cuts, but may also necessitate somewhat higher taxes.

As for health-care reform, many business leaders favoured the idea, complaining that the current system is increasingly a drag on the competitiveness of corporate America. But the bosses do have a point; it is hard to imagine that a president who really understood the depth of America's economic problems would have pushed ahead with such a huge, disruptive reform at that particular moment. And it is also true that many of the details of the bill remain to be worked out.

Uncertainty also hangs over energy prices, despite the apparent failure of cap-and-trade legislation. Many big firms, including electric utilities and others with long investment horizons, believe that a price on carbon is inevitable sooner or later, perhaps through regulation, since the Environmental Protection Agency is empowered to treat carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. They would prefer certainty to the current confusion.

So it would be tempting to conclude that Mr Obama's business critics protest too much, especially as their failure to create jobs in America coincides with earning huge profits and sitting on record amounts of cash. Better to point the finger of blame at the White House, they might well think, lest it be pointed at them.

Except that, as a person with first-hand experience of Mr Obama's decision-making points out, the “atmospherics really do matter”. The mere perception that the administration is anti-business is “starting to make the bosses of Fortune 500 companies more risk-averse,” says a billionaire who used to run one of America's leading internet firms.

Another valid criticism is the absence of any former business executive in the cabinet, meaning that there is no “go to” person for corporate America. “Surely he could have given us commerce secretary. Who has even heard of the current guy?”, wails one veteran boss. (The current commerce secretary, by the way, is Gary Locke, a professional Democratic politician and former governor.) For all their attempts to reach out to business, Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's chief of staff, and Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser charged with “public engagement”, haven't cut the mustard (Mr Emanuel is almost certainly on the way out as well). After all, notes the veteran, just like his boss they have “never had to make payroll”.

As for Mr Obama, when he meets businesspeople at fund-raisers and the like, he too often shakes hands and moves on, leaving them feeling he was more interested in a photo-op than a conversation. He caused offence and disbelief a while back by turning up for a meeting with a group of prominent chief executives and then reading to them from a teleprompter.

The absence of a former business executive in the White House has hurt Mr Obama in other ways, too, reckons the former official. For instance, there has been no one to cast an eye over speeches to root out words that might inflame business sensibilities. Nor anyone to point out that there might be economic costs to shutting down all offshore oil exploration in response to the gulf oil spill, or that railroading BP into stumping up $20 billion for clean-up efforts might strike many business leaders as playing fast and loose with the rule of law.

And there is something about having run a big firm that gives a cabinet member the ability and clout to speak truth to the president about the need to address a particular problem “right now”, says a former official. This would have been a particularly valuable counterweight to the influential but rather ivory-tower academics in the current White House.

Who might Mr Obama recruit from business to the cabinet? Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, would be an interesting choice as treasury secretary, but Wall Street is probably still too toxic a source of candidates for high office and, besides, Mr Dimon's recent criticisms of the administration have done him no favours. More plausible, and certainly less controversial, choices in the rumour mill include Anne Mulcahy, the former boss of Xerox, Eric Schmidt of Google (who resisted Mr Obama's earlier solicitations, but may now be asked again) and Roger Ferguson, a black former Federal Reserve governor who now runs TIAA-CREF, a big fund-management firm.

Recruiting the right corporate executive, or even two, might make the world of difference to commerce's perceptions of the president, especially on the heels of some recent pro-business measures, including tax incentives for investment and research and development. It looks as though the time has come for Mr Obama to stop attacking the fat cats of business and try stroking them instead.