Hypocrisy is an abiding weakness of most politicians. Republicans tend to specialize in hypocrisy regarding sex and family—think of Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, or Robert Livingstone—while Democrats go in for financial or class hypocrisy—think of John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, or John Edwards.
Recently, I went with friends to a talk by former Senator Edwards at New York’s Cooper Union, to hear, in the candidate’s words, how he plans to “dramatically reduce poverty.” Laudably, he wants to cut the current poverty rate of 12.6 percent by a third within a decade. But he offered few specifics. Those that were trotted out, such as more job-training programs, sounded like leftovers from the Great Society days. But if Edwards is retrogressive about poverty, he’s been very progressive in building up a fortune of as much as $62 million.
Tim Middleton of MSN, evaluating the former Senator’s new financial disclosure statement, describes Edwards as a man “of the people and profits” with “substantial investments in limited partnerships, sub-prime mortgage lenders, and an offshore hedge fund.” Edwards has (to some degree rightly) criticized offshore hedge funds as unpatriotic, and sub-prime lenders as piratical. He’s described the sub-prime lending business as the “wild west of the credit industry, where . . . abusive and predatory lenders are robbing families blind.”
But Edwards’s principal employer in recent years, Fortress Investment Fund III, is based in the Cayman Islands. Fortress owns Nationstar mortgage, which describes itself as “one of the nation’s leading mortgage lenders offering non-prime mortgages,” and should presumably be one of the objects of Edwards’s scorn. Fortress (where Edwards has $16 million invested) has also agreed to purchase Penn National Gambling, the third largest gambling company in the U.S. Anyone who has visited casinos in urban wastelands like Atlantic City, New Orleans, or Gary, Indiana knows that such places prey on the delusional hopes of the less-well-off. Edwards is, in effect, investing in a tax on the poor. (He also owns stocks in Schlumberger, Haliburton’s chief rival. Could this affect his political judgment?) These sorts of contradictions are not exclusive to Edwards. Fred Thompson, whose dealings as an attorney were subjected to scrutiny today in the Washington Post, has been described as both a million-dollar lawyer-lobbbyist in a pickup truck and a Washington outsider from the D.C. suburbs.
But then what? Shouldn’t it possible to have an adult debate about politics that recognizes that politicians, even more than the rest of us, are sometimes caught up in contradictions? What’s not adult is when Edwards, speaking to citizens as if they were children, hypocritically argues that he joined Fortress to learn more about the connections between financial markets and poverty.
