Countering the Chamber of Commerce?

Jon Chait points us to a CNN article detailing the White House's efforts to undermine the Chamber of Commerce. The White House takes an unfortunately predictable approach,

The White House has been working behind the scenes to boost an outside group of corporate executives, known as Business Forward, to help set it up as a kind of rival organization to the Chamber of Commerce. The idea is, according to senior Democratic strategists, that the executives who make up Business Forward can stand up and support the president's agenda -- serving as a counterweight to Chamber opposition in order to show that the business community is not unilaterally anti-Obama.

And this is, in a nutshell, today's Democratic Party. How do we counter out-of-control corporate interests? By enabling a new set of corporate interests who promise us that they really do support the President's agenda. I don't see any way that this plan can't work!

How about empowering workers instead? Maybe letting EFCA wither and die in the Senate was not just bad policy but also very bad politics?