I never underestimate the ability of the American middle class to be fooled or swindled, but no one should believe the reasons why so many super-rich members of our executive overclass claim to hate President Obama so much.

It isn’t that he spends too much. He’s spent at a lower rate than the either President George  W. Bush or President Reagan; our huge deficit is the result of so many Americans being out of work after the economic collapse, thus being disappeared from the tax base. It’s not that he’s been bad to Wall Street. The TARP funds saved it and the market has flourished under his leadership. It’s not that he’s making government bigger; growth of government has been nominal under Obama while it grew greatly under his predecessor. It’s not that the Affordable Care Act will cost America so many jobs; 30 million new citizens receiving health care will create a huge number of jobs.

The hatred stems from two things: 1) He wants to do away with the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and return to the Clinton rates. 2) He’s dared to point out that there are inequities in our system and that the 1% has become arrogant, entitled and destructive. And they’ve reacted to that news flash in an arrogant, entitled and destructive fashion.

From “The Billionaires Next Door,” an excerpt at Reuters from Chrystia Freeland’s new book:

“It is this not-our-fault mentality that accounts for the plutocrats’ profound sense of victimization in the Obama era. You might expect that American elites — and particularly those in the financial sector — would be feeling pretty good, and more than a little grateful, right now. Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and trillions of dollars lent nearly free of charge by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a ‘hidden gift’ to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to precrisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle.

But instead, many of the giants of American finance have come to, in the words of a mystified administration economist, ‘hate’ the president and to believe he is fundamentally opposed to them and their well-being. In a much quoted newsletter to investors in the summer of 2010, hedge fund manager — and 2008 Obama fund-raiser — Dan Loeb fumed, ‘So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire.’ Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street — both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed dial list — recently told me that the president is ‘antibusiness’; one went so far as to worry that Obama is ‘a socialist.'” (Thanks Browser.)