Across the Great Divide

Here's How to Fix the Congressional Housing Crisis.

I'm not a fan of gotcha political stories, regardless of who's being got. The story on Norm Coleman's Washington DC crash pad is one of those. Dinging him for accepting landlord leniency just invites counterattacks and ends up lowering the public's respect for all elected officials even further. (See the latest revelations about Rep. Charles Rangel's rent deals.)

Coleman is paying below-market rent to a friend who does work for his campaign, which doesn't look great, but it's hardly a Capitol crime compared to, say, taking big favors from big pharma.  Beyond appearances, the issue really is who's giving the break and what they expect in return.

Coleman is already giving his landlord his campaign direct mail business, it appears. Yes, it's a benefit not available to the general public, but it's hard to see how shaving a few bucks off his rent would make a difference.

I'm more bothered by this one detail in the Strib's showcase tour of Coleman's crib:

Turn the corner and the senator is within leaping distance to his tall full-sized bed, covered with a mound of pillows.

"Full-sized" is a pretty imprecise description of a furnishing that has well-known size designations, and a "mound of pillows" is a very curious feature in an otherwise spartan batch pad that barely has room to turn around.

To reporter Emily Kaiser, this decorator's touch may have seemed normal. But I would ask my male readers to tell us whether they have ever remotely — without female intervention — considered voluntarily piling any bed they occupied with pillows, which must be removed each night, put somewhere, and then replaced again in the morning.

Not. Gonna. Happen. This could be a realty house stager trick, the act of a woman with a shopping habit, or a basement display of metrosexuality, but it is not what regular guys do.

We had a discussion about this in our household, and my domestic partner came up with the idea that each state could provide optional housing for its Congressional delegation — a sort of DC apartment version of the governor's mansion concept.

In my big government extension of her states rights version, the federal government buys or builds housing near the Capitol available to any elected official required to maintain a residence in their home district. One complex would consist of apartment units for members who decide to move their families to Washington; the other would be designed for single members who are simply looking for convenient, affordable quarters while they are in town.

Rents would be priced at the same level as the income-based reimbursement available through Section 8 housing vouchers. Members would be free to accept the subsidized, below-market rate, or to find their own accommodations. Unrented units would be offered to public renters who qualify for Section 8 subsidies.

Just a thought.

Renter Coleman: Unjustly Accused.

DFL Chair Brian Melendez sent me an email today about Sen. Norm Coleman's sweetheart rental deal — for "a huge English basement with a media center, office space, gorgeous custom marble and oak bar plus an airy guest bedroom and bath" — in a million-dollar Capitol Hill town house owned by a political consultant friend who does work for the Coleman campaign.

(An English basement has windows that are at least partially above street level and mechanicals on the same floor.)

I'd already read most of what was in the email, including the $600 rent and the fact that Coleman hadn't always paid his rent on time. But one detail caught my attention. Coleman offered furniture in lieu of rent, which his landlord accepted, and then he continued to use it.

Melendez says:

And don’t forget to insist on still using the used furniture after you’ve sold it. After all, if it worked for Norm Coleman, it should work for you, too, right?

Do we really think it will work for you? Probably not, because average Minnesotans don’t get sweetheart deals like Coleman did. But give it a shot, anyhow — then shoot us a message at usedfurniture@dfl.org, with a photo of the used furniture that you tried to pay with, and let us know how it went.

Well, sorry Brian, but I do know an average Minnesotan who got a very similar sweetheart deal:

The Minnesotan is a semi-employed 25-year-old who moved back here to take responsibility for a child he fathered out of wedlock.

He rents a basement in a $215,000 house in Crystal, a downscale, inner ring suburb. The bedroom is small, with an egress window; the living area/media center lacks daylight, oak and marble,  but the bath is pretty nice. His rent is $550 plus a share of the utilities, so pretty close to Sen. Coleman's.

He is now three months behind in his rent, but he has a nice leather sectional couch he obtained for well below market value by moving it out for someone who was remodeling. I accepted it in lieu of two months rent when he was out of work. It will stay in the basement when he moves out.

Like landlord  Jeff Larson, I have absolutely no expectation that my tenant will do any huge  favors for me some day.

So you can see such deals are probably quite common. If I were you, I would not vilify a U.S. Senator for accepting something clearly similar.

P.S. Sorry there are no pics of the basement and the couch, but I think I should respect my tenant's privacy.

Corporate Espionage Hurts Trust in Government.

In the 1990s, a Maryland-based private detective agency composed of former CIA agents and law enforcement officers spied on such activist groups as Greenpeace, the firm's records show.

— "Corporate Espionage Detailed in Documents," Washington Post

The Iraq war has put the focus on private contractors like Blackwater that employ former military and law enforcement agents to do the dirty work for corporate and government customers in dangerous places overseas. But this Washington Post story touches on another aspect of the business: Former government agents spying on activists who may threaten corporate enterprises.

I think it's legitimate for companies to defend themselves against corporate espionage — attempts by competitors to gain access to business information. It's also reasonable to take steps to protect their people and assets from attack. It makes sense to employ people experienced in those fields, and retired cops, FBI and Secret Service agents make good candidates for those jobs.

But when the work turns to spying — or in more benign terms, intelligence gathering and preventive security — I worry about former government employees getting involved.

Here's an outline of how privatization of security  works.

An oil company hires a former FBI agent to oversee security of drilling sites and pipelines. A wealthy landowner buys up local ranches and employs a former game warden to protect his home and keep poachers off his property while he's in Malibu or Switzerland. The developer of a ski area worries about eco-sabotage of the lodge and condominiums he's building, so he hires a few moonlighting county sheriff's deputies.

It's the law enforcement version of the revolving door that puts former regulatory agency heads to work for the companies they once regulated. The retired agents have the knowledge, techniques and contacts of their former jobs with few of the restraints. And in many cases, like the Blackwater boys, they're making a lot more money for a heck of lot less aggravation than in their previous jobs. Their loyalty easily swings from protecting the pubic interest to protecting the boss.

As someone with numerous law enforcement people in the family, I don't begrudge them the opportunity to work in the private sector once they've retired. But how does this affect the public trust of law enforcement, when they see ex-agents freed from the restraints of their old jobs engaged in questionable behavior? How does it influence current law enforcement people who aspire to similar jobs when they retire?

Friend Me, Angelo.

I give you good price.

— Universal sales pitch

Mortgage lending before the meltdown was a bazaar, with all sorts of "deals" to be found, whether you were a low-income, first-time home buyer, a stated income entrepreneur in over your head, or a U.S. Senator. And especially if you were a high-income borrower who might bring more business to the institution.

Now a few Senators and former federal officials are in the news for taking allegedly advantage of Countrywide Financial's "FOA" — "Friends of Angelo" Mozilo — VIP loan program.

Before his company's fall from grace, Mozilo looked for influence in Washington however he could get it, through campaign contributions, high-priced lobbyists and easy lending, not just to power brokers but even to financial journalists. Savings offered under the FOA program do not appear to amount to more than a few hundred or thousand dollars.

Of course not.

The "value" of a VIP program, whether it is with a bank, car dealer, union, strip club or political campaign, is to make the member feel special and expand the relationship in a way that favors the program sponsor. It's designed to increase business or profitability — either directly from the recipient or from referrals, reciprocal favors and implied endorsements.

The way things really work, if you're in a "program," have to make a request or stand in a special line, you're just a prospect with the capacity to spend marginally more than the schmucks on the other side of the rope — and the value of your privileges reflects that calculation.

Do you think Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Tom Hanks, Elliott Richardson or Madonna are in VIP programs? That's where the real favors get handed out in America — to players who don't need them and won't ask for them.

If the Mozilo favors involved any quid pro quo, they were unethical. But given the mortgage business climate and the way things work in halls of power, this looks more like business as usual, with one player telling another one, "call my friend, he'll fix you up," the borrower gets a slightly better deal, and everyone feels a little bigger.

These so-called "highly favorable loans" to Sens. Dodd and Conrad not that special, but don't expect the Party of Business to say much about that.

Some familiar with Mozilo's practices say he made no secret of the incentives. "It was something he handed out like party favors. He was fairly forthcoming with it," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance Publications. "As long as I can remember, he was offering that."

Although a majority of those named in the Portfolio magazine story are Democrats, I'd be making the same point if the proportions were reversed. This story is about how money and power and advantage mingle so casually, not about outright buying of influence. Tangentially, it's about people like Jim Johnson, why Johnson had to resign as Obama's vetter of VPs, and why Obama needs to look more carefully at his "friends."

Nobody argues he's not a different kind of pol. The missing element in this picture, however, is that too much newness can begat naiveté about the way that power politics works and what makes the big players tick. It takes years of experience and listening at keyholes to fathom the underground financial and emotional connections that can control decisions made for supposedly other, more noble motives.

Of course, this kind of thing takes place among friends at all levels of society from the street corner, Kiwanis Club and church basement to the country club, yacht racing circuit and Bohemian Grove. Favor trading, special access and deals almost always come wrapped in mixed motives, not all of them bad or even consciously exercised by the parties.

But as this dealing and friendly influence peddling reach the upper strata of power, it's not just between two people who may be trying to help each other. It has a way of reaching out and touching us all.

"Look for these," a Countrywide manager wrote in a Sept. 27, 2002, e-mail, after receiving applications from Kati Marton, [former UN ambassador Richard] Holbrooke's wife. "These loans are incredibly important to Angelo and as such they are incredibly important to us."

And eventually, important to the rest of us.

The Last Day, Redux.

I want to say also that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind.
— Bill Clinton in South Dakota, wrapping up his campaign

Scott McClellan's new book wasn't the only presidential "betrayal" this week, although the other one was at least once removed. In a long Vanity Fair piece, Todd S. Purdum — husband of Bill Clinton's first press secretary Dee Dee Myers — does a number on the ex-president. (Purdum states Myers was not a source for the story, which is no doubt true in the same way former presidents do not solicit lucrative business opportunities; they simply materialize of their own accord.)

The tale is not so much about the ultimately unknowable Clinton as his reflection in the people who surround him — notably some uber-rich (think private airliner, not private jet), hyper-smart, rampantly narcissistic men with intimations of mortality kept at bay by irrepressible sexual indulgence and exhibitionistic philanthropy — the-rules-don't-apply-to-me crowd, to which both Clintons so nakedly belong. Last December, Huffington Post profiled one such icky character, Jeffrey Epstein, unapologetic billionaire teen massage collector, who seems to be one of the few Clinton cohorts who isn't involved with the film industry.

It's not that the Clintons are extraordinary for attracting dodgy financiers, stock manipulators and outright fraudsters with international business connections. It's just that the Bushes show more refined judgment in whose money to take and whose jets to ride.

Though the story will no doubt get the Purdum/Myers household crossed off the Clinton Christmas card list, it will have no more impact on Clinton than McClellan's will have on President Bush. Both tell opponents what they already knew, partisans what they are ashamed to admit and presidents what they are unable to hear.

UPDATE: Bill Clinton has reacted to the story. In case you missed it, he says the story is all about Hillary.

"You know [Purdum] didn't use a single name, cite a single source in all those things he said.. It's just slimy. It's part of the national media's attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It's the most biased press coverage in modern history. It's another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in his church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn't do anything about it. The first day he said 'Ah, well.' Because that's what they do-- he gets other people to slime her."

Bill, on the other hand, will do his own sliming, thank you.

Shingle Karma.

On Friday a neighbor came by canvassing for the American Cancer Society. It came up that we were replacing our roof on Monday. She asked me if we had hail damage. I said no, and she said are you sure? Then she began recounting the neighbors, including her, who'd recently gotten new roofs paid for by home owner's insurance.

A home repair company has been working the area, finding hail-damaged shingles and agreeing to replace the roof for whatever the insurance company would reimburse.

I don't know that they are doing anything wrong. Maybe we do have hail damage that hasn't yet caused any apparent problems. But I'm generally suspicious of solicitations by construction outfits who "just happen to be working in your neighborhood."

One of their sales guys came by here the other day. He may have been the same guy I saw door knocking earlier in the week as I was biking home. Since he looked like a missionary, I took an extra spin around the neighborhood. Not in the mood.

I checked them out on the web and didn't find too much about them being shady or shoddy, although several prospects noted a two-hour sales presentation. No, thanks, I'll take the missionary.

When the salesman is wearing a suit, the antennae really start vibrating. It means the price is going up because the guy on the front step isn't the one doing the work. (A roofing contractor along one of my routes has a sign up looking for sales help and promising "40%" of something.) And if it takes a two-hour presentation to convince me to fix a problem I didn't know I had, maybe the real problem is keeping the roofing crew working.

The key to this sale, of course, is the promise to take advantage of the insurance company. That's why you buy insurance, right? Maybe, but I had something more in mind like replacing a tornado-flattened house, not fixing dimples in my 20-year-old shingles. My neighbors may have free new roofs, but I get to feel morally superior.

Originally, the roofers were supposed to come last Monday, but we put them off a week.

Yesterday it hailed like hell.

Brodkorb Spins More Facts into Lies.

Is Michael Brodkorb, the avenging troll of the Party of Business and Capital, actually clueless about business and investment?  Or is he and the party deliberately presenting big untruths disguised by little facts? Which is it? Stupid or vile?

Let's give him a little credit and go for vile.

In one congratulatory post he says: "The Republican Party of Minnesota (MN GOP) just released a bombshell about Al Franken." 

The bombshell is, gasp, Al Franken invests in mutual funds like most other Americans who still have money left over after buying food, shelter, transportation and maybe health care. This is bad because Al Franken has criticized Sen. Norm Coleman for putting the interests of Exxon and Halliburton above working families. But Franken is a hypocrite because why?

"Franken’s mutual funds have extensive holdings in big oil companies, as well as firms such as Halliburton."

If I thought it was worth it, I'd dig up data on how few mutual funds do not include stocks of oil and oil services companies. If I thought Mr. Brodkorb and his GOP cohorts cared, I'd distinguish between doing the bidding of oil companies and investing in a fund that includes their stocks. Finally, I'd explain how an investor picks a mutual fund because of its investment style and objectives, which are supposed to remain constant, not the individual stocks in the portfolio, which change based on the judgment of the fund managers.

But see, I've lost you already with the facts and the reason, when all Brodkorb and Mark Drake have to do is say, look at all the oil companies Franken takes money from!

UPDATE: If you want to see the absolute futility of debunking these lies among the conservative set, you really must read the comments over at Brodkorb's post. Reader Hiram makes a concerted attempt to explain the fungibility of oil and the fact that proceeds of stock and mutual fund sales go to the owner of the investment, not to the company. Sigh.

Then when I point out the big lie, Michael can come here and comment and say, "My statements were factual."

For those of you who still care about the truth, tell me if these Franken investments are, as Brodkorb and the GOP characterize them, "awash in big oil."

Brodkorb/The Party of Capital says Franken's Calvert Large Cap Growth Fund invests in Chesapeake Energy Corp and EnCana Corp. This Calvert fund is actually a social responsibility fund that has 10.8% of its total portfolio in energy stocks, particularly those in renewable energy development.

It will not invest in companies that have poor environmental records, including significant compliance and waste management problems.

Here's the scorecard of the fund issued by Social Funds:

And here's another description:

If you're looking to invest in the big names, but still want to be environmentally friendly, the Calvert Large Cap Growth Fund (CLGAX) could be a good start. The fund screens for and invests in large cap stocks that have reputations for being conscious of the environment.

—Five Green Mutual Funds You Ought to Know

Calvert's top 10 holdings (see chart) include no oil stocks. You'll see this is a pattern that holds through the other investments cited by Michael "Ethics is Practically My Middle Name" Brodkorb.

American Funds Income Fund of America Class F invests in Chevron Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp, Marathon Oil Corp, Occidental Petroleum Corp, Royal Dutch Shell, Total SA, according to the GOP mouthpiece.  But  despite all those names, the percentage of the portfolio in oil, gas and consumable fuels is a mere 5%, half of which (click on the graphic) is Chevron.

What part of Large Cap don't you understand, Michael? The fund invests in big companies.

Then there's Thornburg Core Growth Fund Class A, which holds shares of that noted Capitol Hill powerhouse, ATP Oil & Gas Corp.

Actually, ATP Oil and Gas is kind of the junk man of the oil patch. It focuses on acquiring and drilling proven undeveloped reserves that the big oil companies have decided not to pursue.

ATP is not among the top ten holdings in the fund, which means it has to be less than about 3% of the portfolio. This is growth fund, by the way, which focuses on smaller companies that are in growing markets like, uh, oil.

Van Kampen Equity & Income Fund contains some recognizable names: Exxon Mobil Corp, Halliburton Co and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. Again, absolutely stellar oppo research skills dredge up the damaging infomation in this portfolio, which contains a total of 8.41% invested in energy.

Again, none of those names appear in the largest equity holdings graphic for the fund. Meanwhile, our boy missed another oil services company in the portfolio, Schlumberger, which my ethics compel me to report, no matter how damaging this revelation may be to the Franken campaign!

And finally, there's FT Franklin Income A Fund , which contains Callon Petroleum Co, Canadian Oil Sands Trust, Chesapeake Energy Corp, Chevron Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton Co. and Royal Dutch Shell, according to our crack research team.

Canadian Oil Sands did make the top five holdings, with a whopping 1.8%, so you can just imagine how much those other companies must amount to, creating huge pressures on Franken to compromise his principles and vote for the interests of Canadian Oil Sands and ATP Oil and Gas.

Except, as Mr. Brodkorb has already established, Franken doesn't even pay attention to the details of his tax returns. Now, we're supposed to believe he's poring over his mutual fund prospectuses to find out who he  must to please next?

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

Playing the Robocall Card.

I was not very complimentary of a recent "study" by Women's Voices, Women Vote (WVWV). Maybe this is why my Spidey sense was tingling.

Turns out the Dem-leaning, non-profit group Women's Voices Women Vote has now admitted conducting an unethical and probably illegal anonymous robocall campaign in North Carolina that's clearly aimed at confusing potential primary voters who might be expected to support Obama.

And this.

[T]he firm in charge of voter outreach for WVWV is MSHC Partners, whose president is Hal Malchow. Sourcewatch.org reports that Malchow was a member of WVWV's leadership team.

At the same time, MSHC also does direct mail and outreach for the Hillary Clinton campaign. In fact, the campaign owes MSHC $807,000, according to Politico.com.

TPM sees other ties to Clinton.

WVWV, though, just says oops!

Defining Franken: First His Jokes, Now His Business.

For months, Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dribbled out scores of out-of-context clips and quotes from a man whose business it was to say funny things. The humorless Michael Brodkorb labored mightily but unsuccessfully to define Senate candidate Al Franken as a mean man — never quite getting that many voters  understand the difference between cutting remarks about people and cutting programs that help people. 

So Brodkorb kept digging, and at last he got his mainstream media stories, if not his cherished attribution. While many people get the difference between a comedian and a bigot, fewer understand running a small but complex business. Thus, Franken's failures to make proper business filings in New York and California can more credibly be blown up into gargantuan character flaws and ethical lapses.

I'd wager at least half the U.S. Senate could not walk you through their tax returns, and if I found one senator's return without a signature from a professional tax preparer, I'd be shocked. On that basis alone, Franken would fit in. And when you add the fact that a senator's main job is to pontificate in committee and read speeches with conviction while staffers do the work, why, he's eminently qualified. Franken, at least, writes most of his own material.

Does bad paperwork disqualify him? As a former business owner who has not yet picked a candidate, I say no. But then, I have some empathy that has nothing to do with politics.

Most entrepreneurs, entertainers and other innovative types succeed by focusing intensely on creative output. Soon they are horrified to discover the are running a small business. This is the last thing they want to do. It is also the last thing most of them are cut out to do. While some will have succeeded by focusing on the details and others by focusing on the big picture, none get very far in business by focusing on the minutia.

Except for those stalwarts who do it for a living, filing tax forms and keeping up with regulations is minutia — especially in a business like Franken's that involved many different income streams from multiple states. Speaking fees, publishing and broadcast royalties, paychecks for TV appearances and associated expenses must only be part of his accounting. Then there's keeping up with tax and business law wherever he may land and pick up a payment.

Trust me, anyone in his situation will rely on others to stay on top of this stuff.

For example, I sold my company in 2005 but still own a very small stake in it. Among the 70 or so pages of tax forms I file each April, eight pages go the state of Georgia, where the company has an office. This year, I sent a check to Georgia for $6, the amount due on the taxable business income from Georgia attributed to me for 2007, which is still sitting on the company books, not in my pocket.

Meeting this obligation no doubt cost me more than I paid in tax. Was I aware I owed this tax? Only because my accountants told me so. Did I pay the correct amount? I have no idea and even less interest in reworking my accountant's computations, which were based on reports from my former company's accounting firm. If a problem turns up, I'll address it.

Franken's affairs were certainly much more complicated than mine, and his supposed transgressions may involve larger amounts, but I haven't seen any evidence he did anything to exploit the rules, intentionally evade his responsibilities or conceal his income. In my book, he's guilty of antipathy toward paperwork and a failure to hire the right people to watch over his areas of disinterest.

Minnesota had a U.S. Senator in the early '90s who also relied on the advice of lawyers and accountants for how he structured his speaking fees, publishing expenses and Minnesota condo ownership. By most accounts Dave Durenberger was once a pretty good senator and became an even better ex-senator. I had some empathy for him at the time, too, and was willing to accept that his conduct was in good faith. If you couldn't find a lawyer, accountant or investment advisor who'd tell you a shady deal was okay back then, it only meant you didn't have enough income to warrant sheltering it. But after reading this analysis and this retrospective from a former Republican staffer, I'm not so sure.

The difference between the two cases illuminates a couple relevant points, though. Franken's errors were passive, Durenberger's, active. Franken's failure to file may have temporarily put additional money in his pocket, but if you're a public figure and that's your goal, you structure a deal that looks legitimate, as Durenberger and his advisers did. Franken's business lapses occurred when he was flying around the country as an entertainer, not when he was a U.S. Senator collecting honoraria from groups that had legislation before his committees. Franken's oversight sullied only his future campaign; Durenberger's cast a shadow over all politicians and the institution he served.

Sure, I wish Franken had been given more attentive counsel, found the errors on his own and corrected them before the stink factory got a hold of them. I wish he had explained himself more completely and clearly. But does this say anything about his ability to carry out the work of the Senate?

I think the real lesson is about why more lawyers than business people run for public office.