The New York Times ran an article this morning about Barack Obama and some investments the Times believes are suspicious. Since the piece ran on the front page, and it wasn’t written by John Solomon, I read it expecting to find something relatively damaging.
But after going through it a couple of times, it seems, to borrow a phrase, like a “gotcha” without the gotcha.
Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.
One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.
The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.
Now, it seems this last paragraph should effectively end the story. Obama was not directing his investments, his broker was. As his spokesperson explained, when Obama learned of the investments he sold them at a loss.
So what’s the problem?
Is there evidence that Obama directed the investments? No. Is there evidence that the investments benefited the companies? No. Did Obama make a quick buck? No, he lost money. I kept looking for the tidbit that would justify the front-page treatment, but it never came.
The NYT piece identifies two separate investments, one with a satellite communications company, and the other a biotech company.
As for the prior, the company was backed by Obama donors. That, in and of itself, isn’t particularly scandalous, but Obama divested anyway, probably to avoid the appearance of impropriety. He lost $15,000.
On the latter, Obama’s broker invested in a biotech company that was working on an avian flu treatment. The NYT notes that Obama was active in pushing for an increase in federal financing to fight avian flu, but so were plenty of other lawmakers. They were, apparently, worried about the avian flu. The implication of the Times piece is that Obama might have taken on the issue to benefit the company that his broker invested in without his knowledge, in the hopes that the company’s stock price would go up, which in turn would help improve Obama’s investment portfolio a little. If it sounds rather convoluted, it’s because it is.
There’s very little smoke and even less fire — just like with John Edwards’ home sale, Hillary Clinton’s charitable donations, and Harry Reid’s boxing tickets.
One almost gets the sense that the national media is desperate to find some kind of Democratic scandal, whether the facts warrant it or not.