New Edwards kerfuffle

I really would have preferred not to say anything about this, because, well, its the sort of thing that could turn into a full-time job. But when I saw that Byron York had decided to join the frenzy, I figured, Why not?!

In the last several weeks, a number of Democrats have been cooling on John Edwards, troubled by what has become known as "the house, the hedge fund, and the haircut."  Now they've got another reason.  The New York Times reports that Edwards' much-ballyhooed tax-exempt poverty center in North Carolina, the Center for Progress and Opportunity, mainly benefited one person: John Edwards.

Devilish! Here's the most serious charge from the Times story:

The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was Mr. Edwards himself, tax filings show....

The organization became a big part of a shadow political apparatus for Mr. Edwards after his defeat as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004 and before the start of his presidential bid this time around. Its officers were members of his political staff, and it helped pay for his nearly constant travel, including to early primary states.

While Mr. Edwards said the organization’s purpose was “making the eradication of poverty the cause of this generation,” its federal filings say it financed “retreats and seminars” with foreign policy experts on Iraq and national security issues. Unlike the scholarship charity, donations to it were not tax deductible, and, significantly, it did not have to disclose its donors — as political action committees and other political fund-raising vehicles do — and there were no limits on the size of individual donations.

Here's the breakdown of the $1.3 million as completely as I can tell parse it from the story: a). $540,000 for exploring new ideas, b). $300,000 for college scholarships, c).  $460,000 for unspecified stuff, but probably travel and salaries, etc. I can't say I know what any of this means, or if his ratio of giving to overall funds-- nearly 25 percent--is low, normal, or high because the story doesn't even consider that.

But the bigger issue as I see it is this: Whether his was a poverty center or a joint poverty and political fundraising center, we should be mostly happy to tinker with a formula that works as perversely as ours does--a system that requires candidates to take money from powerful interest groups in exchange for acquiescence on important policy matters upon their election. That's the formula that brings us...the current American government. It's what brought us Cheney's energy task force, the health care and pharmaceutical lobbies, king coal, big oil, and every other powerful and often nefarious group out there buying power away from voters.

I can't say for sure that Edward's $1.3 million doesn't come from these interests. But I can say that I doubt most, if any of it does. The numbers just don't seem right. The groups whose influence we most want to limit aren't going to give small donations to his poverty center--where much of the money will go to poor people--when they could just as easily donate to his campaign or various PACs or whatever. Plenty of trial lawyers and unions already give him money directly. Still, the Edwards campaign refuses to divulge this information and, well, that's probably not smart--they could at least say who the money's not coming from so that they and we might all be spared the overheated innuendo about his "shadow political apparatus."

The other critique--that with the organization's money, Edwards met Iraq and other foreign policy experts? Well, it's a bit of a stretch, but Edwards does speak often of a foreign policy rooted in the cause of alleviating third world poverty. That doesn't fit the facts very well, but I sort of suspect that that's how he'll construe it. Personally I don't think he ran the Center for Promise and Opportunity with only poverty in mind--and I simply don't care. In fact, I'm fairly certain that some of his activities atop the Center were in fact rooted in his desire to one day become president. It's just that I also think this model--though far from an ideal, publicly financed system--is actually an improvement over, say, the Clinton- and Bush-family models, which should be discarded in as short an order as possible.

Update: Hilzoy points out that the Center for Promise and Opportunity Foundation awarded the scholarships, while the regular old Center for Promise and Opportunity spent money on "exploring new ideas." I've now decided that the article itself is so unclear as to be totally useless to a Friday blogger. And at the same time, it lacks any information about what charitable work the latter foundation did with the more than $700,000 left over.