...Evident throughout the letter [by hedge-fund billionaire and Obama foe Leon] is a sense of victimization prevalent
among so many of America’s wealthiest people. In an extreme version of
this, the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass.
T. J. Rodgers, a libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has
taken to comparing Barack Obama’s treatment of the rich to the
oppression of ethnic minorities—an approach, he says, that the
President, as an African-American, should be particularly sensitive to.
Clifford S. Asness, the founding partner of the hedge fund AQR Capital
Management, wrote an open letter to the President in 2009, after Obama
blamed “a small group of speculators” for Chrysler’s bankruptcy. Asness
suggested that “hedge funds really need a community organizer,” and
accused the White House of “bullying” the financial sector. Dan Loeb, a
hedge-fund manager who supported Obama in 2008, has compared his Wall
Street peers who still support the President to “battered wives.” “He
really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it; he just gets a
little angry,” Loeb wrote in an e-mail in December, 2010, to a group of
Wall Street financiers.
The purported activation of the
fund-manager “sleeper cell” is more than the self-aggrandizement of the
super-rich. It is having a material and intellectual impact on the 2012
campaign. Historically, incumbent Presidents have enjoyed a strong
fund-raising advantage. Going into this year’s race, President Obama had
the further benefit of his record-breaking haul in 2008. Yet the
Republican National Committee and Romney, a mechanical campaigner whose
ability to inspire passion in the Republican base was widely questioned
during the primaries, hold a huge cash advantage over Obama. The biggest
shift has been among wealthy businesspeople, particularly in financial
services. Romney’s advantage is compounded by the advent of Super PACs
in this Presidential campaign, which are not subject to the same
contribution limits as parties or candidates. The Republican-aligned
Restore Our Future, for instance, has raised ninety-six million dollars
this election season, and many of its top donors, who give a million
dollars or more, work in finance.
The President, in Cooperman’s
view, draws political support from those who are dependent on
government. Last October, in a question-and-answer session at a Thomson
Reuters event, Cooperman said, “Our problem, frankly, is as long as the
President remains anti-wealth, anti-business, anti-energy,
anti-private-aviation, he will never get the business community behind
him. The problem and the complication is the forty or fifty per cent of
the country on the dole that support him.”
Framing the political
debate as job creators on one side and the President and the fifty per
cent of Americans who are supported by the state on the other was
striking at the time. It has become even more so since Mitt Romney was
secretly recorded at a closed-door fund-raiser in Florida, in May,
saying that forty-seven per cent of Americans don’t pay income taxes,
are “dependent on the government,” and will vote for President Obama “no
matter what.”
Romney’s comment has been widely criticized as a
mistake that could cost him the election, with even Republicans accusing
their candidate of incompetence. Cooperman’s statement six months
earlier shows that Romney’s forty-seven-per-cent remark wasn’t an
undisciplined slip by a gaffe-prone politician but, instead, the
assertion of a view that is widely held by people of Romney’s class.
America’s
super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be
fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry. In his
letter, Cooperman detailed a Horatio Alger biography that has made him
an avatar for the new super-rich. “While I have been richly rewarded by a
life of hard work (and a great deal of luck), I was not
to-the-manor-born,” he wrote, going on to describe his humble beginnings
in the South Bronx, as the son of working-class parents—his father was a
plumber—who had emigrated from Poland. Cooperman makes it known that he
gets up at 5:20 A.M.
and is at his desk at Omega’s offices in lower Manhattan, on the
thirty-first floor of a building overlooking the East River and
Brooklyn, by 6:40 A.M. He rarely gets home before 9 P.M.,
and most evenings he has a business dinner after leaving the office. “I
say that I date my wife on the weekends,” he told me one August
afternoon at his office. The space is defiantly modest, furnished with
nineteen-nineties-era glass coffee tables, unfashionable yellow couches,
and family photographs.
Cooperman’s pride in his work ethic is
one source of his disdain for Obama. “When he ran for President, he’d
never worked a day in his life. Never held a job,” he said. Obama had,
of course, worked—as a business researcher, a community organizer, a law
professor, and an attorney at a law firm, not to mention an Illinois
state legislator and a U.S. senator, before being elected President. But
Cooperman was unimpressed. “He went into government service right out
of Harvard,” he said. “He never made payroll. He’s never built
anything.”
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