Obama, in India, Makes Nice With U.S. Business

Barack Obama touched down in Mumbai on a Saturday in November 2010 with two audiences to impress, and neither of them was the Indian public. The first was American business, which had spent hundreds of millions against his party in the midterms. The second was the American voter, who had just handed him what he himself called a "shellacking."

So the Asia trip was billed as diplomacy but functioned as repair work. Obama spent his India hours talking up American exports and the jobs they would create back home — the president as salesman-in-chief, a role that would have been unthinkable for him two years earlier. (The Wall Street Journal's original report from Mumbai.)

India, for its part, played the role graciously. Mumbai rolled out the red carpet; the business deals got signed; the strategic partnership got its photo ops. But the subtext was hard to miss: the most powerful man in the world had come to India not to lecture it, but to ask something of it. In 2010, that was still a new feeling — and India noticed.