Having failed to get one of its own into the White House, corporate America is not sulking in a corner nursing its broken Romneyphile heart. Instead, some of the country’s best known bosses have been flashing their legs in the direction of Barack Obama, promising to make it worth the president’s while if they start over. Mr Obama is smiling right back, at least for now. On November 14th he sat down with a dozen chief executives and listened to their concerns. They spoke about the sour relationship between the White House and business, and about their frustration at Washington’s refusal to tackle the nation’s fiscal problems. “I came away feeling very encouraged,” said one of the bosses, Dave Cote of Honeywell, a prominent budget hawk, though he added that he was “not confusing words with results”.

Other business chiefs are joining the cooing. “Relations between the Obama administration and large segments of the business community have been strained and unproductive,” wrote Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, in a billet-doux in the Wall Street Journal on November 14th. “But the election offers an important opportunity to forge a more productive relationship.” After all, he pointed out with an implicit wink, there is currently “more than a trillion dollars sitting on the balance sheets of non-financial companies”. You make nice, we make nice back.

When these business titans talk about bipartisanship, they don’t mean simply that Mr Obama should capitulate to the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Their top priority is a deal between the two parties to prevent the American economy from plunging over the “fiscal cliff” into recession. Mr Blankfein called for “shared sacrifice” and even argued that rich people such as he should pay higher taxes (something the Republicans currently refuse to contemplate): “I believe that tax increases, especially for the wealthiest, are appropriate, but only if they are joined by serious cuts in discretionary spending and entitlements.”

American bosses want prompt evidence of bipartisanship. Ideally, that would mean a deal by the end of the year between Mr Obama and the retiring “lame duck” Congress. Businesses would view that as a clue as to whether the next four years will be a period of market-friendly policies. They would like to see a long-term reform of America’s public finances, perhaps along the lines sketched out by the Bowles-Simpson commission on reducing the deficit. They would also like to see a more laissez-faire immigration policy and the adoption of a sensible (ie, pro-fracking) national energy policy. Appointing Erskine Bowles as Treasury secretary would be a good start, businessfolk reckon. (Mr Bowles is a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and a stout advocate of budgets that add up.)