Two articles in today’s Washington Post Real Estate section remind me of how off-target a Post political article was a couple of months ago. The House of the Week is Paul and Bunny Mellon’s Upperville, Va., estate, which features a 10,000-square-foot main house on 2,000 acres and is being offered for $70 million. The Mellons often entertained their friends John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy there. Bunny Mellon, the daughter of the man who cofounded the Warner-Lambert drug company, married the heir to the Mellon Bank fortune. Sadly, she made headlines late in her long life for her multi-million-dollar support of Sen. John Edwards’s presidential campaign, including money to cover up his extramarital affair.
Meanwhile, the feature article in the Real Estate section looks at “an American palace,” a 40,000-square-foot house (and you thought the Mellons were extravagant at 10,000 square feet!) in Potomac, Md., built by a businessman who started a company with a federal grant, built it on government contracts, and then sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Frank Islam says that “‘to whom much is given, much is expected.’ It’s our responsibility to give back and share.” And share he does, with the kind of people who made all that government largesse possible:
Since moving into their 14-bedroom, 23-bathroom estate in 2013, the homeowners have regularly staged events for the Democratic Party. They held a June dinner attended by Vice President Biden and a fundraiser for Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) this month.
Islam and Driesman have hosted nearly all the region’s Democrats, including Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown; Sens. Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia and Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland; and Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett.
All of which reminded me of another Post story by a longtime reporter back in May, which turns out to have been about the very same mansion:
The Potomac estate of IT entrepreneur and philanthropist Frank Islam seemed more fitting for a Republican soiree than a Democratic fundraiser, some of Maryland’s top elected officials said Wednesday….
“There are not too many people who own homes like this who are great Democrats,” Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) told the audience of about 400.
As I said at the time, “Democrats don’t have much trouble finding billionaires and mansions for fundraising events. Reporters shouldn’t act like it’s an unusual event.”
A month after that Sen. Harry Reid declared in one of his tirades about billionaires in politics that the Democratic party “doesn’t have many billionaires.” (Or maybe he said “any billionaires”; the audio is unclear.) Politifact found plenty of billionaire donors to both parties. Whatever you think of many politics, reporters should stop recycling Democratic spin that big money is found on one side of the aisle.