Indeed, if the chamber has seen smoother days, so has the Obama administration. Unemployment is stubbornly high at 10.2% and likely will tick higher. Major initiatives on health care, climate change and financial regulation are struggling on Capitol Hill. Grumbling among business executives about the difficulty of making investment plans amid so much uncertainty is on the rise.

"The current administration has a lot of change underway. Naturally, that implies some degree of uncertainty and some degree of instability," said John Surma, CEO of U.S. Steel. "The president was elected on a platform of change, and that's what we're dealing with."

The frictions aren't going away. The chamber's advocacy of low taxes and light regulation collides with Obama's aggressive use of government to battle the financial crisis, and the two sides represent diametrically opposed views of how Washington should work. It's no surprise that a president who vowed to "tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over" is clashing with an organization that boasts it "leads the pack on lobbying expenditures."

In the beginning, the chamber proved an unlikely ally for the administration's desperate efforts to prevent a wounded economy from collapsing. After backing the Bush administration's controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the group swung behind Obama's $787 billion fiscal stimulus measure to prevent the country from falling into "a depression," Donohue says.

"This wasn't just a matter of support. There are lot of people, including people in the White House, who wonder whether they could have gotten this passed if we didn't go help them get the critical last votes to make that happen," he adds.