It’s Tone, Not Taxes, a Tycoon Tells the President

December 5, 2011, 8:41 pm Hedge Funds | DealBook Column
It’s Tone, Not Taxes, a Tycoon Tells the President
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Leon Cooperman, a 68-year-old Wall Street veteran, says he is for higher taxes on the wealthy. He would happily give up his Social Security checks. He voted for Al Gore in 2000. He says the special treatment of investment gains, or so-called carried interest, for private equity and hedge fund managers is “ridiculous.” He says he even sympathizes, at least to some extent, with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

And yet, Mr. Cooperman, a man with a rags-to-riches background who worked at Goldman Sachs for more than 25 years in the 1970s and 1980s before starting his own hedge fund, Omega Advisors, which has minted him an estimated $1.8 billion fortune, is waging a campaign against President Obama.

Last week, in a widely circulated “open letter” to President Obama that whizzed around e-mail inboxes of Wall Street and corporate America, Mr. Cooperman argued that “the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them.”

He went on to say, “To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment.”

This gets you to the to the first break on the left: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/.../?ref=politics

Been saying that all along....... Obama isn't a leader; he's a divider. Just like I said; always pitting one side versus another.