Apparently, when Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama bought their Hyde Park mansion, they got “an unusually low discount interest rate” on their $1.3 million home loan from Illinois’ Northern Trust Bank, well below what others could have expected to get. As political news, this isn’t in the same category as Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, getting sweetheart deals from Countrywide Financial Corp.—unlike Countrywide, Northern Trust isn’t in the middle of a financial scandal—or even the news that Sen. John and Cindy McCain were four years behind on the taxes on their California beachfront condo (they had nearly caught up on their back taxes when the story broke); but it does highlight the fact that when you’re a rising star, when you have influence and your influence is increasing, everybody wants a piece of you, and everybody wants to get on your good side. It also highlights the fact that the appearance of impropriety, or of partiality, can be as damaging as the real thing. (Just ask Sen. McCain, who’s been criticized in some quarters for having lobbyists on his staff even though he’s never yet changed positions at a lobbyist’s behest.) This is yet one more thing at which Sen. Obama doesn’t have much experience; I hope for his sake (and for all of ours) that he’s guarding his heart, and his integrity, carefully.“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.”—Lord Acton
Lord Acton has it exactly right. These are not good men by any means. They are, at best, at a tolerable level of corruption.
I think that in these cases, it would be really easy to forget the power dynamics in play and just think “Wow, what a nice bank we have. Everyone is so generous. Lucky us.”
Yeah. That’s the temptation, isn’t it . . .