Business of post-midterms Washington is . . . business

ONE of the Republican Party's political icons has been former US president Calvin Coolidge, an ardent proponent of free-market economics who had presided over the American economic boom during the so-called Roaring Twenties of the preceding century, at a time when Ronald Reagan was starting his career in Hollywood and Milton Friedman was still a bookish teenager.

Mr Coolidge, who wasn't known for employing fiery rhetoric - in fact, he was nicknamed "Silent Al" - is still remembered for his quip that "the business of America is business (in fact, what he actually said was "the business of the American people is business"). Critics on the political left have mocked the line, suggesting that it demonstrated the way Corporate America sees the nation's political system - as an extension of its interests and as a target for manipulation and control.

In a way, much of the debate in Washington and around the country in the decades that followed the Coolidge presidency centred on an effort to place constraints on businesses through government regulations and by taxing more heavily those who own them. While some of these trends were reversed under president Reagan and his successors, the political consensus remained that the role of the federal government was first and foremost to protect the interests of the members of the country's middle class against the overreach and abuse by powerful corporations.