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RICHMOND, Va. -- Standing behind the counter of her home-and-garden gift store, nestled amid other shops and offices in a quaint shopping village off state Route 60, Gwen Moore says in a soft voice, "I fear Obama."

Moore is a native Virginian, and a Republican, who opened Cottage Lane eight years ago. Like many small business owners, she is unnerved by the sweeping health care legislation passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law in 2010 by President Obama, despite the fact that it exempts small businesses from its mandates. "I detest what Obama is doing," she says. Thankfully, she adds, her congressman is doing exactly what she wants him to do: He’s standing up to the White House.

That congressman is Eric Cantor, the House majority leader whom Obama has tried to make the poster child of partisan Washington gridlock. In September, the president promoted his new jobs plan in Cantor's Republican-leaning 7th Congressional District near Richmond. A month later, at a Texas event to sell his jobs plan, he called out Cantor by name, saying, "He won't even let this jobs bill have a vote in the House of Representatives."

It's unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility, some Democratic officials say, that their party can oust Cantor from Congress. But the tense exchanges between the president and the second-highest-ranking Republican in the lower chamber have come to epitomize the negotiating-table disconnect that now characterizes Washington. The spat also seems to be energizing their respective bases in this part of Virginia, a critical battleground state heading into the 2012 election.

While Moore thinks Cantor has shown "a tremendous amount of courage to stand against a corrupt system," Abbi Easter, the Democratic chairwoman of the 7th district, describes the congressman as "petulant, arrogant . . . standing up thinking he is some muckety-muck and treating the president really badly." Cantor rose quickly within the Republican leadership. An attorney who had served five terms in the Virginia House of Delegates, he was tapped by then Majority Whip Roy Blunt to serve as his deputy, and became a key player in getting support for the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill in 2003. He earned street cred for being a savvy fundraiser, but as majority leader Cantor has come to embrace the right of his party and is often seen as a thorn in Speaker John Boehner's side during critical negotiations.

Cantor's increased profile on Capitol Hill -- in fact, he tops GQ’s new list of the 50 most powerful people (not named Obama or Biden) in Washington -- has encouraged two Democrats to challenge him in his home district, says Easter, and a third is considering doing the same. These runs appear to be largely symbolic, as Cantor has won by large margins since his first election in 2000. "It's a difficult district, but people are very frustrated," Easter says.

Easter and state Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman Don McEachin of Henrico County -- which includes some of Cantor's district -- are encouraged by this past November’s commonwealth attorney race, in which a Democrat pulled off a surprise victory over two Republicans, including one backed by Cantor. Democrats put out robo-calls using Cantor as a target, which McEachin believes helped propel their candidate. McEachin served alongside Cantor in the state house and remembers him as "always someone you could work with." Now, he says, he doesn't recognize the "Washington version" of Cantor and is put off by the way he is "treating the executive branch." (McEachin also notes that Cantor sent him an e-mail when his father passed away.)

While Democrats are riled up over the congressman's treatment of the president, Doug White, a Republican who runs a small business consulting firm in Cantor's district, sees Obama's treatment of Cantor as uniting his foes: "My enemy's enemy is my friend," he says, echoing an old proverb.

The relationship between Obama and Cantor, two men with similarly strong ambitions but very different ideals, intrigues University of Richmond political science professor Daniel Palazzo, who has come to know the majority leader. "You have a president who sees in Cantor a foil of some kind," he says. And despite Cantor’s divisive reputation in Washington, Palazzo sees him playing a more unifying role, like he did in 2003 with the Medicare bill, within his party in the upcoming presidential elections. Cantor “is an establishment Republican, but he has really been called upon to be two things: the opposition party's voice against the president and to represent the interest of the Tea Party in the House," Palazzo says. "In a sense, he's got a foot in two different worlds, the ones that Mitt Romney” -- should he be the nominee -- “is going to try to bring together."

But Cantor's colleague Bobby Scott, a liberal Democrat whose district borders Cantor's, thinks the attention paid to the Cantor-Obama relationship is distracting. Scott wouldn't call Cantor out directly -- he insists the Virginia delegation on Capitol Hill is close-knit, thanks to the group's former dean John Warner, "who kind of set the tone that it makes more sense for us to get along with each other . . . but it doesn't mean we agree." Nonetheless, he blamed Republicans in the House and their leadership for stalling the president's jobs plan.