A friend of mine sent me an article from last week's City Business Journals, which found that small business owners give President Obama mixed reviews so far.

Some small business owners are optimistic but many are not.

A lot of small business owners are angry about the bailouts, too; many reject the idea that any company should be ‘too big to fail.'

Few survey respondents think the stimulus package will turn the economy around and even fewer believe their firms will receive any direct benefit from all that government spending.

And, as far as I can tell from this survey, large numbers of small business owners are woefully ill-informed.

But, as far as I am concerned, none of that is really relevant and none of it explains why I'm writing about it.

I'm writing about it because the folks who conducted this survey deliberately excluded microbusinesses. They chose to talk only to firms with between 5 and 499 employees, which were then weighted by business size and geographical location "to reflect the small-business community at large."

My friend wondered how it was possible to ignore more than 90% of the small business population and still claim to represent "the small-business community at large."

I thought that was an excellent question. In fact, I thought that was such an excellent question that I simply had to tell you about it.

Sadly, however, I find myself completely unable to answer it.

The article gave no reason why microbusinesses were excluded. There probably wasn't room to get into lengthy discussions of methodology.

On a certain level, maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Maybe microbusiness owner opinion might have fallen out in such a way that the numbers reported in the City Business Journals would essentially have been unchanged.

Or maybe not. Sadly, we will never know.

Maybe these folks just need to stop trying to write about ‘the small business community at large,' since the largest segment of that community is so obviously missing from their view.