Taking stock of the campaign: Conflict-free investing is difficult
(So what. He admitted fudging the facts in the prologue. Read Lillian Hellman's Julia, if you want to know about great literary liars.)
Then, reporters traced his ancestry to find -- saints preserve us! -- slave-owning men and women in his family through his mother's side. Obama is a black man with a checkered past. (We all have skeletons in the closet. Some phone us once a week to gripe about their health.)
And now there are snoops nosing into his stock portfolio!
The Obama team got a tad defensive when I started asking about the senator's investments as revealed on TheStreet.com. "Is this the result of information that came from another campaign?" asked Obama spokesman Bill Burton.
Has Hillary been secretly calling my office? Shucks no, but Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani and McCain likely have huge stock portfolios simply because they've been investing longer than Obama.
However, according to TheStreet.com, some of Obama's stock-buying judgments are, shall we say, somewhat risky and ethically questionable. He invested in Skyterra Communications and AVI Biopharma. Both of these companies are dependent on the federal government, either for regulation or investment. Hence, the slight annoyance in Burton's e-mails to me.
Burton says the senator bought the stocks in 2005 on the advice of a broker and sold them nine months later, at a loss of $13,000.
But senator, your campaign is supposed to be different. Grass roots? The little guy?
Both Skyterra -- a satellite and communications business that is heavily government regulated -- and AVI Biopharma are involved in national defense issues. Avi Biopharma received $4.6 million in 2005 from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop drugs to combat bioterrorism threats and was in line to receive $11 million more in 2006. "That's not a lot of money when you look at a $700 million company," Burton says.
Well, the amount given in 2005 isn't the issue. It's the question about the company's future need for government largesse. Luckily, Obama sold before this became a concern.
Dr. Patricia Werhane, executive director of DePaul University's Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, says, "there is the perception of conflict of interest" in Obama's investments.
She says the best way to get around the problem for politicians is a blind trust -- but we know it isn't always going to be blind, as former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist showed us. Frist's investments were supposed to be arms-length but he knew exactly how his family firm HCA Inc. was performing on Wall Street. It hurt his presidential ambitions.
Burton says Obama recently invested in mutual funds to avoid a Frist-style conflict of interest. And Werhane agrees it is nearly impossible for a senator to invest in stocks that have no government connection. "Public and private enterprises are so intricately intertwined," she says.
But the bottom line is once you become a presidential candidate, questions will arise about everything you do. No matter how hard you try to slough them off.