We’re Only Billionaires, Just Let us Be and You Will Be Fine

Picador Macmillan

Frank is the author of “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.”

It’s all Obama’s fault that the public appears at times to be waking up from a stupor generated by 30 years of class warfare, says the confused rich guy in a high-rise in the neighborhood you can’t afford to spit in.

In reality, it’s the seemingly interminable recessive “slump that has exposed the mighty to the horrors of criticism,” Harper’s Magazine columnist Tom Frank writes in the opinion section of The New York Times. The economy has turned the minds of some of the public against billionaires, many of whom blame President Obama for using the “rhetoric of class warfare.”

Hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman could be considered Exhibit A of this phenomenon. Cooperman last year wrote an open letter to the president castigating Obama and his “minions” for “setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as ‘class warfare.’ ” A “divisive, polarizing tone” that places a canyon “between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them.”

Stereotypical self-besotted super-rich, this Cooperman. Do not describe the devastating, socially divisive consequences of our actions. Leave us alone and things will improve.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.