Soros Plays Politics

Investor's Business Daily

Politics: As election season kicks into high gear, who should jump in front of the cameras but George Soros. A string of worshipful media stories suggest he's just talking financial shop. We think it's campaign politics.

After several months of seeming hibernation, the leftist billionaire speculator, who calls himself the "stateless statesman," has somehow gotten himself a lot of sudden press coverage. Starting most prominently with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, Soros has been telling interviewers that this is "the worst market crisis in 60 years" and "the end of an era."

Ahem. What the media blitz really coincides with is the heating up of the U.S. election. Soros is well-known for his political views, calling last year, for example, for "a certain de-nazification" of America.

Soros hasn't made any overtly political statements since news he funded MoveOn.org, the radical group that smeared Gen. David Petraeus ("General Betray Us") last fall. But he's still making political contributions. On the receiving end are not only the Barack Obama campaign, but also 501(c) nonprofits and 527 political groups that amount to shadow campaigns.

His newest project is said to be a $40 million startup called "Progressive Media USA" and is explicitly targeting John McCain. The big money group is to be led by professional smear campaigner David Brock, otherwise known for the Media Matters group that tries to nudge mainstream news outlets even further leftward.

But don't expect that to figure much in the perfectly baked puff pieces that call Soros "The Face of a Prophet," as the New York Times gushed Friday, and deal out more of his doom and gloom.

"I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime," the Times quoted him as saying. The dollar, he predicts, will be replaced as a global currency and things will get worse before they get better. A week earlier he told the Financial Times that the current crisis was all Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's fault.

The problem with all this negativity is that it amounts to a thinly disguised form of political campaigning. The statements he makes — and he makes a lot of them — influence perceptions, particularly of voters who aren't in the markets themselves. This helps the left in the same way as straight political campaigning.

Soros presents himself to media sycophants as a wise old philosopher with the global good in mind. To us, he looks more like a market speculator with political opinions that get more attention than they deserve.