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JOHN EDWARDS
NET WORTH: $30 million
PORTFOLIO: Municipal bonds, top mutual funds.
Obama's relative lack of money may earn him some populist street cred -- which John Edwards can't claim. The 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate made millions as a trial lawyer representing plaintiffs in liability cases. He's now worth about $30 million, according to his campaign.
Plus, a few sticky financial decisions haven't helped his crusade to represent the common man. The $400 haircut bill footed by his campaign (which Edwards paid back) earned him some prime-time flak. The blogosphere churned angrily when he accepted a $44,000 fee to speak about "Poverty: The Great Moral Issue Facing America." The former North Carolina senator made about $400,000 in speaking fees in 2006 -- mostly at universities, at about $40,000 a crack.
But his single biggest source of income out of the $1.2 million he earned in 2006 was $480,000 for work done for the Fortress Investment Group, a publicly traded money-management company that runs hedge funds. That makes Edwards one of only a few politicians (former vice-president Dan Quayle is another) who've worked for hedge-fund managers. Edwards has also invested $7.5 million in Fortress.
Edwards says it's legitimate to ask how he justifies working to make the rich richer while espousing the poor. He points out that in 2006 he was also employed, at one-tenth his Fortress wages, by the University of North Carolina's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. And he says his reason for working for Fortress was to learn about financial markets and their relationship to poverty.
Fortress itself proved to be politically incorrect for its former associate, how-ever, when it was revealed that the company had some subprime lenders in its portfolio and also owned some offshore funds that could have served as tax havens for U.S. investors. Edwards says his problem with subprime lenders is that they often exploit poor borrowers. He is also against tax breaks for the rich.
Most of Edwards's assets reside in a conservative portfolio. It includes munici-pal bonds from North Carolina issuers, as well as such fine funds as Dodge & Cox International Stock, T. Rowe Price Mid-Cap Value and a Vanguard index fund.
Sen. Hilary Clinton's Portfolio
