No swagger.

President Obama will host nearly two dozen CEOs at a Washington conference Wednesday intended to repair his relations with business and to tout his new tax cut deal. This morning's meeting at Blair House is the latest in a series of lunches and dinners the Obama Administration has hosted for top executives, but the events have never produced the close political alliance with business that White House aides once imagined. Instead, CEOS have long complained that Obama and his aides have been too stridently anti-business in their remarks, if not their policy making, and today's meetings are an effort to reverse that.

Yes, I'm a broken record with this. But a reminder at how "damaged" business has been by the Obama White House:

Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line, even though U.S. corporations are on track for the biggest earnings growth in 22 years and the stock market is headed for its best back-to- back annual gains since 2004.

And this:

American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms. Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.

Those Captains of Industry should be kissing Obama's feet in gratitude, rather than gearing up to spend hundreds of millions to oust him and other Democrats in 2012.

Rather than beg them to thank him for giving them yet another unnecessary tax cut, and beg them for forgiveness for his, um, something or other -- he should be holding summits with unemployed people and listening to their stories.

But this White House is desperate for Big Business to accept them, despite incessant bailouts and tax giveaways. It won't work. The corporatists sense real weakness and they'll be going for the kill in 2012. And Obama will have spent so much effort to curry Corporatist favor that we'll see more of this, from the 2010 exit polls:

There's no reason the anti-Wall Street crowd should be voting GOP. But Obama is determined to give disenchanted populists zero reason to reassess their votes.