As the Ohio midterms wind to a close, the time has come for all the greatest moments of electoral stupidity to be unveiled. And given the extraordinary likelihood of a GOP sweep in November, voters will probably look back on this election as the election of fake class warfare. The evidence is already staggering of this, but recently, sources with an eye on the practically predestined-to-be-Republican race in Ohio’s 15th district revealed one more nasty piece of evidence that shows precisely why the Democrats’ class warfare oriented attacks have been such a miserable failure.
As longtime readers of this blog know, Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy, the incumbent Democrat in OH-15, is not known for her intellectual consistency. However, for all her refusals to look into serious abuses of power by her own party, Kilroy could still plausibly sell herself as a species of populist, albeit one obsessed with pro-government and anti-Wall Street fetishism. However, a look at Kilroy’s amended Financial Disclosure Statement for calendar year 2008 shows that not only is she inconsistent on anti-Wall Street sentiment, but actively complicit in some of the worst abuses of Wall Street prior to the financial crisis.
Specifically, according to both the aforementioned Financial Disclosure Statement and her Ameritrade profile, Kilroy both bought and sold hundreds of shares in Washington Mutual, one of the worst offenders in subprime mortgage lending, prior to the 2008 election. Moreover, she had a sizable number of shares in stock labeled “Ultra Dow30 Proshares.” The “ultra” designation refers to leveraging in the stock, or in layman’s terms, it means that prior to the 2008 election, Kilroy was actively engaging in Wall Street speculation a scant month before the election, given that she bought the stock on October 13, 2008, and there is no evidence that she ever dumped them. In other words, for all her attacks on her Republican challenger Steve Stivers for his alleged connections as a bank lobbyist, Kilroy fits the image of a profiteer from predatory lending and Wall Street speculation far more.
Perhaps given this blatant insincerity, it is no accident that Congresswoman Kilroy is on the fast track to losing her reelection bid next week.