Which is to say that it’s not going well at all, despite the addition of William Daley as a supposedly pro-business Chief of Staff.  According to The Hill, the “charm offensive” has been light on the charm but heavy on the offensive:

The Obama administration’s push to mend its relationship with business has gone cold only six months into the effort.

Complaints abound about the regulations pouring out of federal agencies to implement the federal healthcare and financial regulation laws.

There’s also fear that labor-friendly policies emerging from the National Labor Relations Board and tax-reform legislation expected in 2012 will further hold back growth.

“With the Obama administration, it just seems to be relentless,” said David Rhoa, owner of a bulk-mailing facility based in Kalamazoo, Mich. “I’ve become accustomed to the fact that this pummeling keeps coming.”

One supposed point of outreach was the review of regulation ordered by Obama earlier this month, ostensibly to remove the government interventions that cost business needlessly and interfered with growth.  However, as Bruce McQuain noted last week in our Green Room, that came with a big catch:

In January, however, he issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to review their regulations, looking for rules that are inefficient or outdated. His aim, he explained on The Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page, was to “root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.”

But there’s a catch: All those new regulations Obama put in place will not be subject to review. Just days after the president issued his order, an anonymous administration official conceded to the Journal that “new regulations will not be priorities for the look back.” Meanwhile, more than a dozen federal bureaucracies—including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board—are exempt from the review because they are independent agencies.

How convenient that the most aggressive agencies got exempted from those reviews!  The same goes for the focus on any regulation not produced by the Obama administration.  Even if the review didn’t explicitly avoid those new regulations, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone hired by this administration would have the nerve to report that the emperor has no clothes.

The problem with that approach is that it’s not the older regulations that are the main problem.  Certainly there will be some that will improve efficiency through their repeal, but businesses already understand the more stable and explicit regulation and have planned for compliance.  It’s the ambiguous regulation created by this administration — and especially its arbitrary enforcement — that keeps capital on the sidelines now.  Investors cannot price risk in the future any longer, which makes them very disinclined to invest in American markets.

Either the White House doesn’t comprehend this, or they simply don’t care.  Either way, Obama’s offer to review regulations is just rhetorical spin.  Businesses have no reason to put any faith in this administration’s economic and regulatory policies regardless of whether they’re malicious or just incompetent.