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Politics : DEMOCRATIC NIGHTMARE - 2008 CANDIDATES -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (420)	3/8/2007 2:58:35 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 654

Senator Obama’s stock holdings: Much ado about absolutely nothing By J. Christoph Amberger Running for public office these days takes more than its fair share of intestinal fortitude. You have to deal with an army of busybodies, whose divine calling is making sure that you’ve never cursed, smoked or consumed more than two glasses of light beer at a time: teacher’s pets that check and double-check if you wash your hands, ears and neck and never forget to floss; and journalistic hall monitors who’re disappointed when they can’t tattle that you engaged in thought-crime or petty larceny, or returned library books a day late when you were 11. Senator Barack Obama is getting a dose of this medicine right now, as he is being questioned over “suspicious” stock investments in companies whose investors included his political donors. All I can see in the reports is a bit of naïveté in setting up the structures, setting up what Obama now calls a “quasi-blind” trust he created for the stock purchases. This is the kind of stuff that makes you wonder what exactly a man with his intellect and resources was thinking (and who he consulted with!) when setting up the infrastructure, but hardly anything that warrants more than a raised eyebrow and a knowing wink. After all, it’s not like being a liberal signifies the absence of garden-variety self-interest and the need for providing for one’s financial future. Despite the public personas they like to project to the gullible, most leading Democrats really do not have no problem making money, keeping it out of reach of the taxman, and speculating with their capital. It’s not just George Soros and Ted Turner, mind you. Sometimes, of course, questions about the nature of the more adventurous wheelings and dealings (certain real estate deals in Whitewater and commodities futures speculations with insider tie-ins of certain former first ladies of the beautiful state of Arkansas come to mind) will have to be labeled part of vast right-wing conspiracies. But then again, good, old-fashioned greed is probably the one truly bi-partisan quality. After all, even permanently rumpled eco-saint Ralph Nader commands a multimillion-dollar stock portfolio and a private trust that at various times has contained sizable shares in funds that are invested in just the oil companies, multinationals and defense contractors, and big pharma companies he preaches against from his soapbox. Heck, even Michael More, self-appointed blue-collar apostle of moral outrage at corporate greed, isn’t all that concerned about it when it comes to shoring up his own nest egg. IRS forms detail holdings in Merck, Pfizer, Genzyme, Eli Lilly, Sunoco, Schlumberger, Honeywell, Boeing and a host of other corporate evildoers. (One year, he even dabbled in trading Halliburton stock. Oh, the irony!) The only danger to society arising from this situation would be de-emphasizing the need to be proactively involved in the creation of your personal wealth -- through investing, financial structuring and financial planning. What’s good and advisable to Democrat politicos should be good and advisable for their electorate. Of course, stressing the financial responsibility of the individual may not be quite the message most liberals would espouse publicly: After all, in its terminal logical consequence, it would eliminate the need for their political platform of government-mandated wealth redistribution. Maybe the message we should take home from Obama’s troubles should be don’t do as they say… do as they do!