William Dunkelberg is a big name in small business

The call came as William Dunkelberg watched the sci-fi thriller Surrogates at a Plymouth Meeting theater. Katie Couric of CBS Evening News would like him on the national broadcast.

With the nation's unemployment rate stubbornly hanging around 10 percent, President Obama was proposing that the U.S. Small Business Administration ease credit terms to boost lending and the job market.

What about it? What did Dunkelberg think? Oh, and would he tape via video link from Philadelphia for CBS the same day as Obama's announcement?

Less than 1 percent of the millions of small businesses in the United States have a government loan of any kind, Dunkelberg said in his cramped professor's office at Temple University as he prepared last month for the Couric interview.

"There's no evidence in my data of a credit freeze on Main Street," Dunkelberg said. "They can borrow money. They have no customers, and that's the bummer." The best plan, he believed, was for the government to somehow give people money to spend at local stores.

When small business seeks to influence the makers of economic policy in Washington, many times they do it through 66-year-old Dunkelberg, a self-described "sci-fi guy" and Jimmy Buffett fan.

This former dean of the Temple business school is not as loud and zany as Mad Money's Jim Cramer, nor as pervasive as Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com. But he has gained an avid following among hundreds of economists and policymakers for his insight into small businesses through 36 years of relentlessly surveying companies with 10 or 20 employees. He talks with investment professionals and hundreds of small-town bankers each year. He even is chairman of a small-town bank, Liberty Bell Bank of Marlton.

New York experts plug into Wall Street. Washington plugs into the White House. Dunkelberg says he believes that he is plugged into Main Street Philadelphia and that his phone number is on the speed dial of financial reporters seeking plainspoken, and sometimes contrarian, views on the recession.

The big question: Where are the jobs? By now small-company owners would be hiring in anticipation of the next boom.