Obama & Google

No one can accuse President Barack Obama of cozying up to corporate America. From his denunciations of Wall Street greed to his critiques of the auto manufacturers, Obama and his team have done little to disguise their mistrust of big business -- except when it comes to one very large, very influential technology company. In Google, the $22-billion-a-year online-advertising Goliath, then-Sen. Obama appears to have found a corporate kindred spirit. Google executives, led by CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are scary smart and supremely self-confident (much like the President himself), and despite their company's growing power, they depict themselves as advocates for consumers. "What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not from the top down," Obama told Google employees during a 2007 visit to its headquarters in Mountain View (CA). Indeed, two of Obama's economic tenets -- support for more U.S.-educated engineers and the expansion of Internet services to poor and rural areas -- grew out of a visit to Google headquarters in 2004.