The reality, not surprisingly, is more complex.

Mr. Obama clearly sees his presidency as far more than a bully pulpit  he has cast himself as a last line of defense against market excesses that take many different forms. “In the past, corporate America was not only at the table, they owned the table and the chairs around it,” Mr. Obama’s combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in an interview Thursday. “Obama doesn’t start off confrontational, but he will be confrontational if there is resistance to the notion that there are other equities.”

But at the same moment, as his critics on the left have pointed out, Mr. Obama has been warding off calls for far more stringent regulations of the banks, hoping to win at least a modicum of business support  and to defuse the notion that he is at war with American-style capitalism.

Each of his confrontations with corporate executives had its own rationale. G.M. had become so uncompetitive, Mr. Obama argued, that its imminent collapse was threatening the jobs of millions of workers; the only way to save the company from its own worst instincts was to become its temporary owner and bring new blood into the boardroom. (It will take years to determine if that worked, but on Thursday, though it was overshadowed by the grilling of BP’s chief executive on Capitol Hill, G.M. announced it was forgoing its usual summer shutdown of most of its plants so it could meet renewed demand.)

The Wall Street executives who needed the government to prop them up, but still thought their services were worth millions a year, were cast by Mr. Obama as a shameless privileged class. Toyota was described as seeking profits over safety; Wellpoint, the insurance giant, was castigated for seeking to insulate itself from the new health care legislation by taking actions that the law will soon prohibit.

Against that backdrop, forcing BP to take a $20 billion bath  even before the inevitable lawsuits are filed  seemed an easy decision. Mr. Obama had no legal basis for the demand, but concluded he did not need one. “He had a power other presidents have used  you call it jawboning,” Mr. Emanuel said.