Leon Cooperman's Fraught Epistolary Relationship With The President Takes Another Dark Turn

It might be time to stop peppering the President with letters and poetry, Leon.

Author:
Thornton McEnery
Updated:
Jan 14, 2019
Original:
Jun 8, 2015

Hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs alumni association president Leon Cooperman has never really embraced the presidency of Barack Obama.

LC has been on a quest to get Obama to see things his way. He's cajoled and pleaded, but mostly he's appealed to the White House through the written word.

In 2011, he penned an open letter to The President that was critical of Obama's rhetorical voice. LC complained that the Commander-in-Chief was being a total buzzkill when it came to the financial sector.

The letter was peppered with fun stuff like this:

"I cannot credibly blame you for the economic mess that you inherited, even if the policy response on your watch has been profligate and largely ineffectual. (You did not, after all, invent TARP.)"

And this:

"But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is your and your minions' role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as "class warfare"."

And this:

But as President first and foremost and leader of your party second, you should endeavor to rise above the partisan fray and raise the level of discourse to one that is both more civil and more conciliatory, that seeks collaboration over confrontation. That is what "leading by example" means to most people.

A melange of passive-aggressive criticism and unsolicited leadership advice, the letter was a genuine attempt by LC to get the President's attention, something that never quite happened. And we know it didn't happen because LC bitched about for quite a while.

And now he's saying that the letter got him audited.

Yesterday, on the sexy new reboot of "Wall Street Week", LC opined that he got audited after sending his open letter but then cagily left idea of causation up for debate.

"You know I got audited by the IRS," he said. "But I don't know if there's any cause and effect."

But let's dive into this. If it wasn't the letter, what did get a man with an estimated wealth of close to $4 billion audited by the IRS?

Maybe it was his granddaughter's poems?

While attending an event hosted by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2012, LC hand-delivered a self-published book of his poetry by his then 14-year-old granddaughter to Obama. The President did not so much as send a thank you note for the gift. We know that because LC bitched about for quite a while.

Regardless of what got LC audited, it seems pretty clear that his attempts to forge a pen pal relationship with the White house has become a dangerous liaison.

News

Last November, hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman penned an "Open Letter To The President Of The United States of America," in which he detailed the many ways Barack Obama was pissing him off. The Omega Advisors founder accused the President (and his "minions") of engaging in class warfare, expressed disbelief that he could attack "capitalists who...fill store shelves at Christmas" and still sleep at night, and advised Obama to "eschew the polarizing vernacular of political militancy," lest he lose* Cooperman's vote the next year. While LC says that he received a major outpouring of support for his words ("[he] keeps a bulging manila folder of congratulatory notes in his office"), others were less than pleased at what they saw as a guy who actually has done pretty okay under Obama lashing out because his feelings were hurt on the occasions the president was perceived to have a "tone" in his voice when discussing the mega-wealthy ("If I knew where you lived, I’d put a bomb in your car," one person wrote Cooperman to say). Similarly, Cooperman's suggestion, on at least two occasions, that America should be worried about the startling parallels between Obama's rise to power and that of Adolf Hitler,** was met with mixed reviews, including one by his wife in which she called him a "schmuck." And while some*** have found it preposterous that Cooperman would paint himself as a victim of Obama, their astonishment speaks to not knowing the whole story, i.e. exactly what this man- no, this monster- did to Leon. Last July, before he had written the letter, Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.) Now do you understand? Now do you understand? Even Hitler would have sent SOMETHING. Super-Rich Irony [New Yorker] Earlier: Leon Cooperman Doesn't Like The Tone Of President Obama's Voice *Just messing about him ever being in a position to "lose" it, of course. **Settle down, he wasn't saying Obama IS Hitler, would would be biologically impossible, he was just saying Obama is the second coming of Hitler, which is something people should be aware of: “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,” Cooperman told the New Yorker in May. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obama’s not Hitler. I don’t even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.” ***Mrs. Cooperman, for example.: She is still a liberal, a position that puts her in the minority in their social circle. “She can be a socialist because she’s married to a capitalist,” Cooperman says of his wife, who is strongly pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. She calls Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry “morons,” and she worries about the underclass. “I care more about the disadvantaged people of America,” she said, comparing her politics with those of her husband.