John Edwards 2008: What’s not to like

Edwards had raised $30 million by the end of September, significantly trailing rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. At that point, the campaign decided to seek public funds.

Under the presidential financing system, candidates get matching funds for every donor’s contribution of up $250. If they accept the money, they must abide by spending limits in each primary and caucus state as well as an overall cap on primary spending. Those restrictions have prompted most of the leading candidates to decide to forgo the public money.

Edwards has so far spent more than $5 million on advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also getting help from independent, mostly labor-financed groups that have drawn criticism from watchdog groups and from Obama. The groups, called “527″ organizations for the section of the IRS code that authorizes them, have been running ads supporting Edwards’ policies in Iowa during the closing days of the campaign there.

Edwards, who made his fortune as a trial lawyer with his wealth somewhere between $12.8 million and $60 million, has refused donations from political action committees and lobbyists and has cast himself as the candidate less connected to Washington special interests. But Obama and other critics say the 527 groups are simply special interests helping him in another guise. Though labor groups have supplied much of the financing, one of the donors is a 97-year-old heiress to the Mellon family fortune.

Edwards has offered a finely honed response, saying he opposes the 527 organizations, but is proud of having the support of unions.

“They’re not running any negative, no attack ads. This is just positive advertising,” he said of the groups Sunday on CBS. “But that aside, I think these 527s need to be banned. I didn’t want them running advertising, and I’ve continued to say that every time I’ve been asked. But I can’t stop these people. I don’t have control over them.”

Associated Press 12/30/07

Loyal Edwards Fundraiser Killed Ethanol Initiative In Wisc.

Scott Tyre, a Wisconsin lobbyist who sits on John Edwards’ national finance committee, has worked to kill ethanol mandates in Madison. In fact, Tyre’s own firm, Capitol Navigators, advertises his efforts to tank that bill next to quotes from longtime Edwards loyalists Ed Turlington and Nick Baldick praising Tyre’s “work ethic” and “brain power.”

“Scott is regarded as one of the top contract lobbyists at the Capitol. When it comes crunch time and you need votes as we did during the ethanol mandate debate in the 2005-06 session, Scott was one of the first persons I called for help. His contacts and lobbying skills are certainly one of the reasons we were able to kill the bill in the Senate.”
–Erin Roth, Executive Director of Wisconsin Petroleum Council/Division of the American Petroleum Institute

Tyre is an Edwards bundler, according to Public Citizen.

Edwards has said on the campaign trail that ethanol is one key to moving the country toward energy independence.

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But Tyre’s anti-ethanol efforts — his firm has also represented the American Petroleum Institute — contradict Edwards’ campaign trail pitch for expanded production of renewable energy sources. And Edwards, as we all know, slams lobbyists at every diner, community center, debate and school rally. It seems perplexing at best then that he’d have one on his team who is fighting his very policies.

Hotline 12/21/07

JOHN EDWARDS has launched a Web site, Americabelongstous2008.com, to decry the influence of lobbyists and PACs. On it, he asks Democrats to pledge not to vote for a presidential candidate who has accepted campaign donations from either evil entity. To put it another way, he has asked Democrats to pledge not to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

This is yet another Edwards attempt to disguise self-serving posturing as moral righteousness. (Did anyone believe his claim that he was accepting federal matching funds because it was the moral thing to do and not because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were sucking up all the Democratic donor money before he could get to it?)

Edwards’ spiel against the “special interests” is as phony as his Cheshire cat smile. Edwards might not accept lobbyist money, but he accepts money from corporate executives and managers at firms that employ lobbyists. How is that any different from accepting the donations of the contractors (lobbyists) those business people hire to represent them in Washington?

Edwards’s self-serving class warfare rhetoric is getting tiresome. Someone should tell him. Maybe we can hire a lobbyist to do it.

The Union Leader

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Edwards+vs.+lobbyists%3a+A+posture%2c+not+a+principle&articleId=f251ddb2-6850-48e2-8564-70077d6b5b84

Since his stint as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in 2004, the tension between Edwards’ private life and his politics has been growing. In recent years, Edwards, 54, has adopted a more populist tone at the same time he’s taken on more of the accoutrements of wealth.

That tension may be one reason that Edwards has struggled against Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.

“I think it does hurt him, because it calls into question his sincerity,” said former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Hartpootlian, who backs Obama. “If you base your campaign on where you come from, the haircut, the corporate portfolio, all that is inconsistent with that.”

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As a lawyer, Edwards went for the big payoffs, making millions suing doctors, hospitals and corporations and building a net worth he’s reported at about $30 million. Edwards wasn’t an anti-poverty lawyer, and he did little pro bono work. He didn’t emphasize fighting poverty when he ran as a moderate in 1998, defeating Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth, or during his six years in the Senate.

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But since his Senate election, he’s traded up to progressively tonier residences: a $3.8 million house near Embassy Row in Washington, a $5.2 million house in Georgetown and finally a $6 million house, which includes a full-size indoor basketball court, built in 2005 outside Chapel Hill.

Edwards also took a part-time consulting job with Fortress Investment Group of New York in October 2005. Fortress raises money from wealthy individuals and institutions, pools the cash in private equity or hedge funds and invests it in alternative ways - buying public companies and taking them private, for instance - to beat usual market returns.

With $43 billion under management, including $16 million of Edwards’ personal fortune, Fortress is among the major firms in its class. While Fortress was incorporated in Delaware, its hedge funds were incorporated in the Cayman Islands, allowing partners and investors to avoid or defer paying taxes. That’s a practice that Edwards frequently has criticized.
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Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, another Democratic candidate for president, has also gotten unwanted publicity from a bundler.

Michigan attorney Geoffrey Fieger and a partner were indicted in August on charges of breaking campaign laws for contributions made in 2004. They had raised $127,000 for Edwards, but are charged with reimbursing employees of their law firm, family members and others for the donations — effectively giving the money themselves in violation of contribution limits.

The major concern with bundling is about influence.

Bundlers’ work is usually closely tracked by the campaigns and “gives individuals a way to be much more important than their personal campaign contribution,” said Taylor Lincoln, the research director at the Congress Watch division of Public Citizen, which discloses known bundlers on its Web site, www.whitehouseforsale.org.

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“The public has no idea who the candidates are leaning on for these vast sums of money,” says Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “The person who gives $2,300 looks just like the person who has raised $200,000.”

Lawrence Norton, former general counsel for the FEC, said there is much more emphasis on these “uber-fundraisers” than ever before, in part because of new restrictions in how other political committees can raise money.

“From a regulatory perspective, what you have are lots of people who are really critical to the campaign but are not part of the campaign, and are not necessarily trained or educated in terms of what they can or cannot do,” said Norton, an attorney in the Washington office of Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice.

“Either they are tripping over campaign finance laws, or the campaign is exposed to criticism or potential violations because of these volunteers who are effectively their agents.”

Edwards released a list of 669 “solicitors” through the first three quarters of 2007. He releases the names of everyone who has collected money, regardless of amount.

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“This is 100 percent about transparency and electing someone who is open and honest to the presidency; that’s why we, unlike our opponents, release the names of everyone who fundraises for Senator Edwards,” his spokeswoman, Colleen Murray, said.

Lincoln disagrees with Edwards’ characterization of full disclosure because he does not reveal how much money each person is responsible for.

“You can disclose nobody or disclose everybody — they’re two different ways of being opaque,” he said.

McClatchy Newspapers 11/19/07
http://lakeexpo.com/articles/2007/11/19/top_news/08.txt

Candidate could be facing a multimillion-dollar dilemma: The majority of his campaign funds come through the PAC ActBlue.

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John Edwards doesn’t accept contributions from political action committees, but the lion’s share of his contributions have come through one particular PAC — ActBlue. And that could be a multimillion-dollar problem for the Democrat’s presidential campaign.The former North Carolina senator has received more than $4.3 million from people who contributed through the PAC’s website, an increasingly common fundraising technique. But it’s also a technique that may not jibe with the clean elections program Edwards plans to use to bolster his cash-strapped campaign.

The presidential public financing system provides up to $250 in taxpayer money for each donation from an individual. But it expressly excludes from matching funds contributions “drawn on the account of a committee.”

It’s unclear whether contributions processed by ActBlue, a pioneering force in online fundraising for Democrats, would be covered by that language. But the Edwards campaign was worried enough to ask the Federal Election Commission for a legal opinion.

If the FEC rules against Edwards, it would be an ironic and troubling twist for a campaign that has struggled to keep pace financially with the field leaders, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois. At the end of September, they had raised around $80 million each, compared with Edwards’ $30 million.

At first, he had announced he wouldn’t participate in the public financing program because its spending restrictions would put his campaign at a disadvantage. But he reversed course in September, rejecting the idea it was a desperate attempt to keep his campaign solvent.

The Politico 11/18/07
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1107/6947.html

John Edwards launched his slight public career — one Senate term, two presidential candidacies — with the money and reputation he made as a trial lawyer. Today he is the candidate of a small fraction of the electorate but a sizable portion of America’s trial lawyers. Edwards says Washington is “corrupt.” Well.

Within Edwards’ lucrative trial bar constituency, there has been a flurry of criminal indictments. Their target has been what Fortune magazine calls the law firm of Hubris Hypocrisy and Greed. (See Peter Elkind’s jaw-dropping report in the issue of Nov. 13, 2006.) The real name of the nation’s foremost securities class-action firm is Milberg Weiss.

It has been indicted as a “racketeering enterprise” that obstructed justice and committed perjury, bribery and fraud while collecting about $250 million in fees from about 250 cases using paid plaintiffs, which is illegal. Several of the firm’s members, past and present, also have been indicted.

Since 1965, the firm has won, often by tactics indistinguishable from extortion, $45 billion from corporations — more than $1 billion a year for plaintiffs claiming to have been cheated as investors. Plaintiffs firms such as Milberg Weiss are paid contingency fees — they are paid only if they win, but up to 30 percent of what is won. Mel Weiss, whose case is going to trial, and his former partner, Bill Lerach, who specialized in volatile stocks of Silicon Valley companies in the 1990s and is now going to jail, each pocketed — it would be strange to say they earned — more than $100 million in the 1990s. The firm itself has been charged with paying $11.4 million to three serial plaintiffs who testified in 180 cases over 25 years, claiming to have been repeatedly defrauded.

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Until Lerach pleaded guilty he was a fundraiser for Edwards, for whom he collected $64,000 from lawyers in the firm he founded after he had a falling out with Weiss. Remember this when next you hear Edwards’ populist riff about trial lawyers as white knights protecting little people.

Real Clear Politics 11/18/07
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/legal_troubles_mount_for_edwar.html

Clinton’s campaign responded by targeting Edwards’ previous consulting work for a hedge fund that owned a sub-prime lender.

“If John Edwards really cared about working people, he wouldn’t have taken a $500,000 salary from a hedge fund that is foreclosing on working people around the country,” said Clinton campaign spokeswoman Hilarie Grey. “Sen. Edwards should spend his time talking about how he’s going to help those people instead of launching ridiculous attacks against Sen. Clinton.”

Edwards worked part-time for Fortress Investment Group, getting paid $479,512. The former North Carolina senator redirected roughly $16 million invested in the fund after learning that two sub-prime mortgage companies it owned had sued to foreclose on 34 New Orleans homeowners. Edwards also used his own money to start a fund to help those homeowners.

He has said he won’t create a similar fund for homeowners elsewhere who were sued by the lenders.

Las Vegas Sun 11/16/07
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2007/nov/16/111610804.html

Yet at the same time, Edwards was also working for an industry that symbolized the overprivileged: a hedge fund, a partnership that specializes in high-return investments for the richest and most exclusive of clients. The firm, Fortress Investment Group LLC, hired Edwards in October 2005, several months after the poverty center opened, to help develop investment opportunities worldwide and offer strategic advice on global economic issues, according to a statement issued by Fortress in October 2005.

Edwards said in an interview that as he explored career options he talked with numerous firms, including Goldman Sachs, and decided to work as a part-time consultant to learn more about capital markets and to make money. Fortress did not return repeated calls for comment.

Edwards also said his role at Fortress was as an adviser, not a decision-maker.

“It was just being a consultant on the phone,” he said. “They would call and ask what I saw happening in Washington, sort of macro view of what was happening in Washington with the economy. What I saw happening in the world. Those were the kinds of things we talked about.”

He earned nearly $480,000 as a consultant in 2006, and stopped his work there by the end of that year; he still has about $16 million of his reported net worth of $30 million invested in Fortress funds. Employees at the hedge fund have given more than $150,000 in campaign contributions to Edwards, making the partnership one of his largest sources of funds.

After he joined the presidential race, Edwards’s involvement with Fortress became a political liability. Fortress had invested a portion of its assets in subprime mortgage lenders who recently began foreclosing on homeowners around the country, including some Hurricane Katrina victims, the poor people Edwards’s poverty center was set up to help.
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When the Fortress investments were revealed in the Wall Street Journal in August, Edwards responded by divesting his Fortress portfolio of funds tied to subprime mortgages. He also helped the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a nonprofit organization helping low- and moderate-income families, launch a Louisiana Home Rescue Fund. He provided much of the $100,000 in seed money for the program, which gave loans and grants to families whose houses were foreclosed on by lenders, including in some case ones with ties to Fortress.

Still, Edwards sounded defiant when he was asked whether he regrets the work for Fortress.

“I don’t apologize,” he said. “Nobody ever gave me anything. I worked my rear end off, and I’ve been able to have some good luck and success in my life. I want everybody in this country to have this chance. I wanted my kids to have a better life. My parents wanted me and my brother and sister to have a better life. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s America.”

Boston Globe 11/15/07
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/15/a_dark_diagnosis_reaffirmed_a_commitment/?page=6

Edwards went negative on Clinton long before Obama, questioning Clinton’s integrity and her role as a Washington insider. Edwards’ campaign has made statements like: “After seven years of George Bush, the American people deserve better; they deserve the truth.” They consistently conflate Bush and Clinton.

Edwards’ history, however, hasn’t been particularly consistent. In 2004, he notably presented himself as a nice guy and refused to attack his fellow Democrats. I guess that pledge is gone.

Edwards has often chosen not to release information when silence suited his purposes. In the 2004 race, he was one of the few candidates not to disclose his bundlers. More recently, he refused to disclose how much money he was paid by Fortress Investments until required to do so by law. Nor did he come forward with information about the $800,000 he was paid for his book by Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house.

Edwards has made poverty a big issue in the campaign. In 2005, Edwards founded the Center for Promise and Opportunity to study poverty. The center raised $1.3 million dollars that year. A New York Times analysis reported that the center benefitted Edwards by reimbursing him for travel and hiring his political staff. Donors had no monetary limits and could remain anonymous, unlike in a presidential campaign.

The Street 11/8/07
http://www.thestreet.com/s/everyone-has-secrets-so-quit-bothering-hillary/markets/marketfeatures/10388967_2.html