Marathon Pundit: Ill. GOP treasurer candidate Dan Rutherford speaks at unity breakfast

Monday, February 08, 2010

Ill. GOP treasurer candidate Dan Rutherford speaks at unity breakfast

State Sen. Dan Rutherford (R-Chenoa) opened his speech at last week's GOP Unity Breakfast with a bang. "Mark Kirk, I agree with you. We cannot afford Alexi Giannoulias as a senator for Illinois." He continued, "And you know what, we cannot afford his chief of staff, as far I'm concerned."

Rutherford...the "Ruth" has a long "U," as in Babe Ruth, by the way, is the Republican nominee for Illinois state treasurer, the office currently held by the embattled Alexi Giannoulias.

His chief of staff is Robin Kelly, the Democratic nominee for treasurer.

I'm going to look past Giannoulias' Broadway Bank troubles and take a suggestion from good friend of the Leslie's Omnibus, who left this comment about Alexi:

Personally, I'd like to see him take a lot more heat for the Bright Start disaster. I have no idea how he keeps dodging that particular bullet.

Here is what Don Rose wrote in the Chicago Daily Observer about Bright Start late last year:

Bright Start is a federally mandated college-savings plan established state-by-state, known generically as a 529. It permits a youngster's family to put money into a special investment program where the profits grow tax-free. The rules and benefits differ somewhat in each state but that tax advantage is at the heart of all.

The treasurer's office administers the program in Illinois. Its role is to find sound, conservative investment vehicles—the kinds that do okay even in an economic downturn. Sort of like doctors' rules: First, do no harm.

Well, Giannoulias and his entourage, Chief of Staff Robin Kelly and Deputy Treasurer Raja Krishnamoorthi, included among Bright Start's 21 investment choices an Oppenheimer bond fund called Core Plus Fixed Income Strategy. The fund was about as conservative as Rachel Maddow, and herein lies part of the argument.

Oppenheimer—one of the country's major investment firms—insists the fund was indeed conservative except a rogue manager got cute late in the game and began investing in wild derivatives—the kind of instruments that helped bring down the economy. Another school of thought says that the treasurer's office should have been monitoring all those mutual funds all the time to be sure their investments remained within their professed bounds.