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The election is getting ever closer, and with the financial reform bill soon to be done, I am turning my attention more and more to the elections. There's a lot to write about in terms of national trends and dynamics, but there are also a ton of fascinating local races worth talking about.
All of them will feature the financial reform issue as a part of the election dialogue (the more the better for most Democrats), but in one race one of the candidates is actually a living, breathing example of how this debate is playing out.
I am referring to a man named Jeff Greene, running for the Senate seat in Florida, who really seems to personify, more than any other candidate running this year, the kind of Wall Street tycoon whose trading brought down the economy. Greene is the guy who says he "took on Wall Street" and made several hundred million dollars on credit default swaps betting against housing prices and mortgages. Greene and his friends argue that Green is just a good guy who played the market right. Joe Trippi appealed to me in an e-mail, extolling his client's virtues, and said the Democratic establishment was beating up on poor Greene.
I haven't done much on this race yet, in part because of being swamped and in part because of all the other races out there. And I gave Greene a second look after Trippi made his appeal. But the more I read about him, the more uncomfortable I get about having this guy represent the Democratic Party. When I read about him calling Heidi Fleiss just another businesswoman; when his close friend and best man was rapist and wife abuser Mike Tyson; when you hear him refer to the Koran as having "all kinds of crazy stuff" in it; when you hear about the kind of sleazy landlord type of experiences people like Ron Howard have had with him; when he describes his bet against the housing economy as something he would proudly do again: he really starts to sound like a character from an Ayn Rand novel (probably a hero to Ayn, but not so much for those of us with some basic decency).
II am also appalled by Greene's description of himself as having made his money by "taking on Wall Street." That's like Goldman Sachs congratulating itself for making a killing selling products they designed to fail, and calling it "taking on Wall Street." No, Jeff, that's not taking on Wall Street: that's acting like Wall Street. It's what one of your fellow investors refers to as being a hyena: taking the dying carcass of the housing market, helping to finish it off, and then sinking your teeth in. Taking on Wall Street would have been to warn people of what was coming, to speak out against it as some courageous economists and Wall Street folks did, rather than just cashing in on the poor suckers who were going under.
Whatever you think about the odds in the Florida Senate race (in a 3-way race, I'm a little more optimistic about the long-term dynamics of this race than some people are), we do not want Greene as the Democratic standard-bearer in the fall election. Florida is a big, important state, with big influential media markets, and we don't want this Any Rand hero to be the guy carrying the Democratic brand. Beating Jeff Greene in the August primary is really important.
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