Obama Enlists ‘Patriotic Millionaires’

Wednesday’s installment of President Obama’s running campaign to raise the taxes of millionaires featured a group of wealthy people who agree with him, standing at his side as he professed that the idea is popular among the gilded elite from Warren Buffett on down.

“The people who’ve joined me here today are extremely successful,” Mr. Obama said during an appearance in the White House complex.

“They understand, though, that for some time now, when compared to the middle class, they haven’t been asked to do their fair share. And they are here because they believe there’s something deeply wrong and irresponsible about that.

“Now, it’s not that these folks are excited about the idea of paying more taxes,” he continued. “I have yet to meet people who just love taxes. Nobody loves paying taxes.”

It could not have been hard for the White House to find this group of supporters, or scores more like them. Their names have been listed for months on the Web site of the group Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength.

Each person on Wednesday appeared with an assistant who, it was suggested, paid taxes at a higher rate than the boss — the inequity that the so-called “Buffett Rule” is meant to redress.

The pairs included Abigail Disney, president of the Daphney Foundation, and her assistant, Celine Justice; Whitney Tilson, managing partner of T2 Partners L.L.C. and his assistant, Kelli Alires; Frank Jernigan, who has retired from Google, and his assistant Teresa Gardiner; and Lawrence Benenson, partner of Benenson Capital, and his assistant, Carmen Peterson.

Millionaires, of course, come in various political hues, and not a few of them are liberal supporters of Democratic causes. Mr. Obama tends to portray his tax proposal, which would set a minimum tax rate of 30 percent for individuals on their annual income above $1 million, as something that enjoys considerable support regardless of party or wealth.

“Most Americans agree with me,” he said at the appearance. “So do most millionaires. One survey found that two-thirds of millionaires support this idea. So do nearly half of all Republicans across America.”

Clearly the White House senses that public opinion is on its side, and that the theme will play well in a fall campaign against the Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, or it wouldn’t be hammering away so persistently as it has been doing all this week.

But in testing public opinion on fairness and taxation, as always in polling, it’s important how the question is framed.

In January, polling by The New York Times and CBS News asked whether people thought that “upper income people pay more than their fair share in federal income taxes, less than their fair share, or is the amount they pay about right?”

Seventy percent of Democrats, but only 37 percent of Republicans, thought the answer was that the rich pay “less than their fair share.”

Notably, that question did not specify that it was “millionaires” who were the loosely defined “upper income people.”

And for what it’s worth, in the Times-CBS poll the percentage who thought that the wealthy were paying less than a fair share was fairly constant, bouncing between 52 and 56 percent, regardless of whether the respondent’s income was less than $30,000, more than $100,000 or something between.

When Mr. Obama said that “most millionaires” favor his idea, he was citing polling performed by the Spectrem Group and reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, according to his staff members.

That poll, however, was odd in one way. It questioned people with investments of at least $1 million. That’s a definition of “millionaire” that includes several million Americans, many of whom never make anything like a million dollars in a single year. But it was asking about the idea of raising taxes on those with incomes of at least $1 million a year — a very different, much smaller and considerably richer group. So that poll could be read as showing that most affluent people favor taxing those who are even richer than they are.

Correction: April 12, 2012
An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength as Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Sense.