I was going to post this in the headlines, but it deserves it’s own post.  Via Gerry Willis at Fox Business:

Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman made public his letter to the President, in  which he calls for Obama to end his class warfare rhetoric and appeal to all  voters today. Cooperman, below, makes the point that the President’s comments  are divisive at a time we can least afford it. The chairman of Omega Advisors  was a one-time Goldman Sachs asset management chief.

OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

November 28, 2011

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President,

It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this. Like many  others, I hoped that your election would bring a salutary change of direction to  the country, despite what more than a few feared was an overly aggressive social  agenda. And 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.) I understand that  when surrounded by cries of “the end of the world as we know it is nigh”, even  the strongest of minds may have a tendency to shoot first and aim later in a  well-intended effort to stave off the predicted apocalypse.

But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is you 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”. Whether this reflects your  principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at  the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist  appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little  importance. What does matter is 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.  It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous  historical precedents. And it is an approach to governing that owes more to  desperate demagoguery than your Administration should feel comfortable with.

[...]

Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society,  and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. As a  group, we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide  them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create  new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce  and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation  funds it) moving. 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. It is also a naked, political pander to some of the basest human emotions – a strategy, as history teaches, that never ends well for  anyone but totalitarians and anarchists.

That last bit is something Obama’s OWS compatriots would do well to remember.  I urge you to go here and read the entire letter. It’s excellent. (h/t Hot Air)