President Barack Obama’s Jobs Council hasn’t met publicly for six months, even as the issue of job creation dominates the 2012 election.

At this point, the hiatus -- which reached the half-year mark Tuesday -- might be less awkward than an official meeting, given the hornet’s nest of issues that could sting Obama and the council members if the private-sector panel gets together.

For starters, there’s the discomfort many business leaders may feel in appearing to embrace the president with his reelection bid in full swing.

Then, there’s the fact that some members of the commission have conspicuously declined to endorse him. And that Obama has conspicuously declined to endorse some of their recommendations. And that some of what Obama won’t endorse has been warmly embraced by Republicans, including likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

To cap it all off, several of the companies whose CEOs serve on the panel are involved to some extent in outsourcing -- a fact that could undercut the ferocious attack Obama and his campaign are mounting on Romney over his alleged ties to the practice.

One former administration official said the current political atmosphere could be prompting the CEOs and other business leaders to lie low.

“The thing is supposed to be bipartisan, so a lot of times they don’t want to get into things that could be used by either side in the election,” said the former aide, who asked not to be named. “The businesspeople, for the most part, don’t want to get into the middle of political fighting.”

The last official meeting of the 26-member President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness took place Jan. 17 in the White House complex. Obama and a slew of other administration officials attended, including his then chief of staff, Bill Daley.

Obama named General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to head the panel in January of last year as the president tried to mend his frayed relationship with the business community and highlight his commitment to job creation. Part of the council’s political value was to show Obama working closely with top business leaders on behalf of the American people. But the White House insisted that the council’s recommendations would lead to real action.

The panel held three “quarterly” sessions last year with Obama: in February, June and October...

One sign of the continuing potential for awkwardness came Monday at a campaign stop in Cincinnati at which Obama denounced Romney’s proposal for a so-called territorial tax system. That proposal, to limit U.S. taxes on American multinational companies to their profits inside the U.S., was also endorsed by Obama’s Jobs Council — but rejected by the president.

A spokeswoman for Romney’s campaign, Andrea Saul, criticized Obama for failing to meet more regularly with the CEOs on his Jobs Council.

“With a half-million jobs lost since President Obama took office, he would be well served to spend more time listening to job creators about what it’s going to take to get the American economy growing again,” Saul said Tuesday in response to a query from POLITICO. “Instead, he’s spent the last two weeks talking about raising taxes on job creation and attacking a central recommendation of his Jobs Council for fundamental tax reform of the kind Gov. Romney has proposed.”

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