New Republic. Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com. Ear to the Ground - Politics Today. Why Do America’s Super-Rich Feel Victimized by Obama? One night last May, some twenty financiers and politicians met for dinner in the Tuscany private dining room at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. The eight-course meal included blinis with caviar; a fennel, grapefruit, and pomegranate salad; cocoa-encrusted beef tenderloin; and blue-cheese panna cotta. The richest man in the room was Leon Cooperman, a Bronx-born, sixty-nine-year-old billionaire. Cooperman is the founder of a hedge fund called Omega Advisors, but he has gained notice beyond Wall Street over the past year for his outspoken criticism of President Obama.
Cooperman formalized his critique in a letter to the President late last year which was widely circulated in the business community; in an interview and in a speech, he has gone so far as to draw a parallel between Obama’s election and the rise of the Third Reich. Discussion that night was wide-ranging. At the dinner, Al Gore was diplomatic when presented with the letter, and asked Cooperman if he would accept higher taxes. The billionaire Obama hate club. So Obama, defending his plan to raise taxes on the rich, says this: “If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been.
They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties,” the President said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.” And billionaire hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, a former Obama supporter, responds with this: “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world … Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied.” Cooperman, like so many of his fellow super-rich, is upset at Obama’s class-warfare “tone.” Freeland says it again: But the real wonder is that Obama doesn’t take more advantage of this obvious public relations bonanza. Democracy Now!