The other day, Barack Obama left the White House, walked across the street and entered the building where Daniel Webster once lived. Today, the United States Chamber of Commerce occupies that hallowed ground, and it is safe to say that until recently the chamber and Obama had little common ground.

But Obama no longer is playing defense in Washington and suddenly is mending fences. He had quite a construction job to perform at 1615 H Street Northwest, but if you read the message the president delivered in the nation’s most sacred temple of capitalism, you might conclude that he put considerable effort into the task.

The man once known as the most liberal senator on Capitol Hill had a few zingers for his new business buddies, arguing that business regulation isn’t really so terrible and maybe even productive, and bidding the guys in suits to put more people in jobs. But mostly he came to build relationships.

Many a truth is said in jest, and here’s the year’s best example: “Maybe if we had brought over a fruitcake when I first moved in, we would have gotten off to a better start.”

Then he added perhaps the most important words of the third year of his presidency thus far: “But I’m going to make up for it.”

Those are words of conciliation for the group perhaps least vulnerable to the magic of the Obama stardust, unless of course you include the people who will be alienated for the mere fact of the president’s having said that — or appearing there.

Right now, however, the president’s problem isn’t on his left, even if the room between Obama and the left is larger than it ever has been. The problem, as he apparently sees it, is in the counting houses and among the people Franklin Roosevelt called the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods,” and he means to fix the problem.

The “rulers” phrase is from FDR’s first inaugural address, and in the very next breath the 32nd president excoriated business leaders for having “failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence.” That is the sort of idiom some people expected from Obama, and for a time he delivered it, heaps of it.

But that was long ago, or at least a few months ago. Today, Obama drops the name Jeffrey Immelt, the head of the General Electric Co., into his speeches more often than President Ronald Reagan referred to George Gipp, and to similar effect.

Columnists were invented to make connections where none existed before, and so let me introduce into this morning’s discussion last week’s demise of the Democratic Leadership Council, which was created in the wake of former Vice President Walter F. Mondale’s defeat at the hands of Reagan, whose 100th birthday we observe this month.

At the time of the DLC’s birth, in 1985, the party had lost four of the previous five presidential elections (and would go on to lose five of six before it would finally prevail). As a result, a group of moderate Democrats, arguing that the party had become captive to interest-group liberalism, sought to reposition the party.

“We thought the Democratic agenda had to change for the Democratic Party to be successful,” said Will Marshall, who founded the group with his colleague from the staff of former Rep. Gillis Long of Louisiana, Alvin From.

The DLC was controversial from the start. Former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York said it wanted the party to “apologize for sins we never committed.” The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said the group’s initials stood for “Democrats for the Leisure Class” and characterized it as the “Southern White Boys Club.”

There are lots of reasons for the death of the DLC now, some of them internal, but one of them is that the group won its battle and outlived its usefulness. The Southern White Boys Club elected a Southern white boy president in 1992 — Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas was the group’s president and he put its pulpit, and its ideas, to good use — and then another S.W.B., Vice President Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, won the popular vote but not the presidency in 2000.

Now the Democratic president is neither Southern nor white. But last week he gave a conciliatory speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a very DLC thing to do.

Indeed, about a minute after he told the chamber he was going to make up for not dropping off that fruitcake, Obama delivered the sort of boilerplate that might have been prepared for Thomas J. Donohue, who heads the chamber and speaks for American business:

“America’s success didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because (of) the freedom that has allowed good ideas to flourish, that has allowed capitalism to thrive; it happened because of the conviction that in this country hard work should be rewarded and that opportunity should be there for anybody who’s willing to reach for it.”

It did not go unnoticed that the president uttered the word “capitalism.”

There is, to be sure, a new struggle inside the Democratic Party, with some of the people who supported Obama wondering what happened to the candidate they knew and loved. But Obama’s focus now is on winning another term and preserving what he won in the health care debate last year.

He’s doing something right — his critics on the left would amend that to say that he is doing something effectively — because the latest Zogby International poll shows his approval rating at 46 percent. It was at 39 percent in November.

Suddenly this is a different president and a different presidency.

The Chamber of Commerce was across Lafayette Park from the White House on the day Obama was inaugurated. But it took a devastating defeat in midterm elections for him to make the walk. He did so last week, and then he talked the talk. The president’s stroll in the park suggests he plans to surprise us again.

— David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.