In his Wall Street Journal ($) Political Capital column today, Alan Murray reports that certain business interests that supported President Bush’s re-election are conducting a quiet campaign to persuade the White House to dump Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, William Donaldson:

The groups argue that the post-Enron crackdown on big business has gone too far, and now threatens to hurt the economy by discouraging companies from taking risks. Their hope is to replace Mr. Donaldson with a business executive who has a reputation for integrity, but also understands the problems that the corporate crackdown has caused for executives and their boards of directors. Mr. Donaldson, they argue, doesn’t.
The Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and other business groups took an unusually active role in this year’s election, encouraging their members to reach out to employees and help register and turn out new voters likely to be sympathetic to the president. Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman has given them generous credit for helping to re-elect President Bush.
In return, these groups are now looking for some easing of the harsher regulatory and enforcement climate that has grown up in the wake of the corporate scandals. . . [business leaders are] particularly bothered by efforts by the SEC, and by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, to force large settlements out of companies by threatening charges.

But Mr. Murray notes that such matters are not discussed publicly because businessmen have become popular whipping horses:

The effort isn’t discussed much in public, and probably won’t get any attention at this week’s economic summit. That’s because polls show corporate executives still rank low in public esteem, and any effort to ease up on regulation or enforcement against them is likely to be politically unpopular.

As noted in prior posts such as this one, the Bush Administration has not been particularly friendly to business interests. In addition to the wayward SEC, the Bush Administration’s Justice Department has been particularly poor in exercising prosecutorial discretion regarding business matters. If the Administration is not responsive to business interests over this clear abuse of power, the Democratic Party will have a great opportunity to modify its traditionally anti-business policies and win over a business community that is increasingly disenchanted with the Bush Administration’s regulation of business through criminalization of merely questionable commercial transactions.