Opinion: If you knew Daly City like I know Daly City...
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The Wall Street Journal‘s Brody Mullins, camera in hand, treks out to the badlands of San Mateo County to find the seemingly modest house of the Paw family, who in conjunction with their associate, New York-based wheeler-dealer Norman Hsu, have made generous contributions to the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-New York). The numbers:
Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show. That total ranks the house with residences in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan’s Upper East Side among the top addresses to donate to the Democratic presidential front-runner over the past two years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of donations listed with the Federal Election Commission.
The article takes hypothetical pains not to say that the Paws are being given money by wealthier people to invest in Clinton’s political future, but just to note that if, in some alt.reality, they were doing that, it would violate campaign finance laws. The story is far from probative: The Paws have a large family with some seemingly successful children (one manages a mutual fund). Their son Winkle acknowledges the family’s association with Hsu (excuse me, Mr. Hsu), and least persuasive of all is the campaign-finance-investigation-by-architecture-review portion of the story:
The Paw’s Daly City home is a one-story house in a working-class suburb of San Francisco. On a recent day, a coiled garden hose rested next to a dilapidated garden with a half-dozen dried out plants. The din of traffic from a nearby freeway was occasionally drowned out by jumbo jets departing San Francisco International Airport.
Don’t let that ‘working-class’ business fool you, comrade. Daly City, a little slice of Purgatory just below the Heaven of San Francisco, is as outrageously priced as only a town on the Peninsula can be. I know an Orthodox priest who spent nearly $800,000 on a D.C. dump not much different from the one in Mullins’ photo — and that was in the late nineties, long before the market peak. I find it not at all surprising that an extended family that can get its paws on this lime-green palace would be able to spend $200,000 becoming ‘Hillraisers.’ Still, this is an interesting piece of enterprise journalism, even if you, like me, are one of those crazy people who believe how you spend money in exercising your First Amendment right to express your political views is your own damn business. And with the warning that life ain’t easy for a boy named Hsu, I commend you to the full story.