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Was Mitt Romney channeling the 1 percenter self-pity of Leon Cooperman?

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The baby needs changing, Mr. President.

I’m actually still amazed by the boundless self-pity of the super-rich in the U.S., who continue to feel aggrieved at the president.

How dare he not love them? How dare he not lavish them with the praise they deserve? After all, unlike the schleps who pound out a 10-hour day, say, in a coal mine or a steel mill… or on their feet all day working at a retail store or in a factory … or a nurse working a 12-hour shift changing bed pans … or a teacher … or a cop or a firefighter … no, they — the super rich – work hard … really, really hard! … or something like that…

But this passage from an excellent New Yorker article about the endless moaning and sense of entitlement by our very own aristocracy is a reminder that when Mitt Romney made his “47 percent” remark at a fundraiser by a richie rich guy, he wasn’t making a mistake, he was channeling his audience:

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. …

…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.

Read the whole article here.


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