READING BETWEEN THE LINES. Matt and Tom Gitlin think “raises questions” financial stories about presidential candidates (on the left!) are bogus. I have a diferent view. I think people still learn something valuable from these sorts of stories; that very often it’s not all what the reporter intended to tell them; and that they have much less impact on public thinking than reporters or political opponents might wish (cough, Harken Energy, cough). I says this both as someone who has written such stories in the past, and as someone who for mcuh of the Clinton administration was a low-information college student who thought Whitewater had something to do with rafting (I was busy, so sue me).
For example, the stories about Barack Obama‘s real estate and financial dealings have taught me that he’s someone who gave a up the shot at making a lot of money in order to pursue a career in academia and government, and who, until he was in his early 40s, still had outstanding student loan debt. I find this last fact incredibly endearing. After he finally made some money just two years ago, Obama, like many new investors, turned to friends for help in figuring out what to do with it, and wasn’t as good about managing it as, say, someone who comes from money, or has long planned to run for national office. He also got a lot of parking tickets while at Harvard Law School, The Boston Globe reports today, and didn’t get around to paying some of them off until quite recently. These data points are not going to do very much damage to Obama’s reputation, but they do add to the portrait of him as a relatively normal person who has only recently joined the big leagues and started prepping for high-level scrutiny. The financial stories say very little about his ethics, but they add to the narrative of his life in an interesting way.
I have similar views on the stories about John Edwards‘s real estate transactions and new house, which have also been roundly denounced on the blogs. Real estate stories about public figures are inherently interesting, and Edwards is a self-made man whose American dream life story is a large part of his personal narrative. It is, therefore, interesting to know about his real estate transactions and new compound. The fact that Edwards has chosen to live in a very, very large house says nothing about his ethics, but it does helps fill in the picture of who he is today (as does the knowledge of how much he sold his last house for). It’s no more of an attack to point out that he’s rich and interested in poverty issues than to point out the same about Bill Gates or Angelina Jolie.
And I say all this from the perspective of someone who thought for most of the Clinton Administration that Whitewater had something to do with rafting (I was in college, so sue me), and can still appreciate how
–Garance Franke-Ruta