President-elect Barack Obama has selected a Mainer, Karen Gordon Mills of Brunswick, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration. A venture capitalist, Mills is regarded as one of this state’s sharpest economic minds.

Her selection should accomplish two goals of the Obama administration: pleasing Sen. Olympia Snowe, who had endorsed Mills, and rejuvenating a federal agency whose duties and responsibilities going forward are quite critical to American economic success.

Since her nomination was announced, some have criticized Mills as lacking experience in, well, small business. Her background is expansive and impressive: a director of Scotts Miracle-Gro, private equity adviser, Harvard Business School and chairmanship of Maine’s council on economic competitiveness.

Lloyd Chapman, of the American Small Business League, derided the pick as Obama’s testimony his administration wants to align with small businesses – but only wealthy ones, not proverbial “mom and pops,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

This view seems shortsighted, given the business landscape in the United States, in which financial problems are hitting all sectors fiercely, toppling giants and subsequently pressuring the small businesses that are the lifeblood of thousands of local economies.

This latter argument was strongest for the eventual $17 billion loan to automakers; that their solvency holds together an organic string of other businesses and industries, whose decline would be felt inside communities, large and small, across the nation.

Given this environment, the Small Business Administration should now have a much different, and pivotal role to play than in the past. It no longer can serve to primarily support entrepreneurs, provide disaster assistance and target loan and grant programs.

Current challenges will demand the SBA become more holistic, especially in regard to business financing, as access to capital likely becomes the single greatest concern, and looming threat, to the vitality of American small businesses into the future.

In this sense, it is accurate to think of government’s role going forward as venture capitalist, putting money into endeavors with hopes of growing business and garnering returns. In the go-go economy, this role was filled by private equity and sovereign wealth funds, which splurged on acquisitions of industries and businesses of all stripes.

Look at Maine’s paper mills, for example. Or Chrysler. Or numerous others.

This position would be unusual for government, but it is one that many leading economists now see as inevitable for the American economy to recover. The next “bubble” some say, will be based on government spending to spur the market.

“The point is that it may take a lot longer than many people think before the U.S. economy is ready to live without bubbles,” wrote Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics, in the New York Times recently. “And until then, the economy is going to need a lot of government help.”

And small businesses especially, because this economy is not business-as-usual. Mills was not a business-as-usual choice for the SBA, which makes her a smart pick for the job.