As Rodney King once said, famously and in a quite different context, "Can we all get along?"

Mr. King, the victim of a police beating in Los Angeles, was referring to race relations, of course. But the same plea now could be applied to relations between the Obama administration and the business community.

That relationship, once so promising, has given way to an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion, as evident from the comments of executives this week at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council, a gathering in Washington of about a hundred of the nation's top chief executives.

It doesn't have to be this way, and some tentative steps may have been taken at the Council meetings to begin changing the atmosphere. If the tenor persists, though, it has real consequences,...