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.”

Cooperman differs from many of his fellow super-rich in one important regard. He understands that he isn’t just smart and hardworking but that he has also been lucky. “I joined the right firm in the right industry,” he said. “I started an investment partnership at the right time.” In the fall of 1963, he enrolled in dental school at the University of Pennsylvania, but within the first week he began to have doubts, and he dropped out soon afterward. “My father, may he rest in peace, was going to work saying, ‘My son, the dentist,’ ” Cooperman said. “It was a total embarrassment amongst his friends.”

Cooperman went on to make a series of fortunate choices. Chief among those was entering the financial markets, after graduating in 1967 from Columbia Business School. In the sixties, Wall Street wasn’t yet the obvious destination for the smart and ambitious, but it was on the verge of becoming the most lucrative industry in America. Cooperman became an analyst at Goldman Sachs, at the time a scrappy partnership that had nearly failed during the Great Depression. In 1976, Cooperman was named a partner. He went on to found Goldman’s asset-management business, but, after twenty-five years at the firm, he decided to start his own hedge fund. Between 1991, when Cooperman founded Omega, and the 2008 financial crisis was the best time in history to make a fortune in finance. Cooperman’s partners who stayed behind at Goldman Sachs are hardly paupers—and those who stuck around for the 1999 I.P.O. are probably multimillionaires—but the real windfalls on Wall Street have been made by the financiers who founded their own investment firms in the period that Cooperman did.

Toby Cooperman grew up five miles away from her husband, in the west Bronx. She asked Cooperman out after they met in French class at Hunter College. Toby has two graduate degrees, in education and as a reading specialist, and works three days a week at a special-needs school in Chatham, New Jersey.

“Growing up lower-middle-class Jewish in the Bronx, I never knew a Republican,” Toby Cooperman recalled. “Everybody loved Roosevelt.” 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. “I have friends who are very dependent on Medicare.”

Even so, Toby, who voted for Obama in 2008, defers to her husband when it comes to taxation, and she admires his letter to Obama. “He used a lot of good words,” she said.

The New York Post published an abridged version of the letter, and Cooperman e-mailed it to some of his friends and colleagues. It quickly went viral. Within a couple of weeks, Cooperman was being courted by everyone from CNBC and Fox to Al Jazeera. “I would say, unequivocally, I never got as much response in anything I’ve ever done, in business or outside of business, that I got in that letter,” Cooperman said.

Cooperman keeps a bulging manila folder of congratulatory notes in his office at Omega. He received “hundreds and hundreds of e-mails.” According to Cooperman, only one was nasty: “If I knew where you lived, I’d put a bomb in your car.” The folder includes a letter from a former chief of Goldman Sachs and another from a current boss of one of the nation’s top five banks. There are succinct letters of support from fellow Wall Street titans, typed on thick, embossed paper, and signed with a flourish, and long, angry screeds, which warn, as a ninety-two-year-old lawyer from Fort Worth, Texas, put it, that “Barack Obama is a Communist pure and simple, with a determined plan to convert America into a Communistic nation.”

Like his wife, Cooperman doesn’t approve of the right’s blurring of the line between church and state, or its stance on gay marriage and abortion. Romney, he told me, has got to “appease the conservative wing of his party. But I don’t think he’s nuts like all those guys are.” Like other plutocrats, Cooperman presents his complaint not as a selfish defense of his pocketbook but as a concern about the degradation of the American dream. Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JP Morgan Chase, who was widely criticized this spring for the firm’s highly risky trade that has led to at least six billion dollars in losses, has echoed Cooperman’s view of the Obama Administration. Speaking on “Meet the Press” in May, Dimon said that he didn’t mind paying higher taxes and wanted “a more equitable society.” But the “anti-business behavior, the sentiment, the attacks on work ethic and successful people” by some Democrats had alienated Dimon so much that he said he would now call himself “a barely Democrat.”

“It’s a question of tone,” Cooperman said. “The President makes it sound like the problems of the ninety-nine per cent are caused by the one per cent, and that’s not the case.” Yet some of the harshest language of this election cycle has come from the super-rich. Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference, is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the President’s as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. After Cooperman made his Hitler comment, he has said, his wife called him a “schmuck.” But he couldn’t resist repeating the analogy when we spoke in May of this year. “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 said. “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.”

“You have to get closer to that banana peel for me to believe you’re serious.” Facebook

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It’s easy to see how even a resolutely unflashy billionaire like Cooperman can acquire a sense of entitlement. In a single hour at his desk one morning in April, the C.E.O.s of two well-known public companies were on the phone to Cooperman lobbying for his support. (He is a major investor in their firms.) Companies courting his investment dollars pick up Cooperman at Teterboro Airport in their private jets to give him a tour of their projects. The Coopermans have chosen an emphatically low-key life style, but when they went to visit a grandchild in Vermont one summer weekend they flew in a private plane.

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.)

When Cooperman told me the story of his lucky escape from dental school, he concluded, “I probably make more than a thousand dentists, summed up.” (A thousand dentists would need to work for a decade—and pay no taxes or living expenses—to collectively earn Cooperman’s net worth.) During another conversation, Cooperman mentioned that over the weekend an acquaintance had come by to get some friendly advice on managing his personal finances. He was a seventy-two-year-old world-renowned cardiologist; his wife was one of the country’s experts in women’s medicine. Together, they had a net worth of around ten million dollars. “It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said. “He needed four hundred thousand dollars a year to live on. He had a home in Florida, a home in New Jersey. He had certain habits he wanted to continue to pursue.