DON’T SHOW ME YOURS AND I WON’T SHOW YOU MINE

4/21/10

This morning’s news reported that Illinois State Treasurer, U.s. senate candidate, and failed banker Alexi Giannoulias has filed for an extension on his 2009 tax return and thus cannot make his yet to be filed return public. His senatorial opponent, the thoroughly conventional Mark Kirk, has lambasted Mr. Giannoulias for this oversight, or tactic, indicating that Mr. Giannoulias must have something to hide, and hinting that that something probably involves the Giannoulias family owned Broadway Bank, which, as readers of this blog know, has taken on many characteristics of a den of iniquity. Mr. Kirk also indicates that Mr. Giannoulias’s failing to file his personal tax returns says plenty about the financial acumen of the man who is Treasurer and would be senator, as if more evidence of Mr. Giannoulias’s lack of financial skill were needed.

I find myself in the rare position of defending Mr. Giannoulias in this instance. Given the troubles at Broadway and their implications for the taxes of the principals at that institution, it is perfectly understandable that he might have been unable to file his return in a timely manner. He probably is not trying to hide anything and will make his return public as soon as it is filed; after all, he is as unimaginative and banal as Mr. Kirk.

What Mr. Giannoulias’s temporary failure to disclose his personal tax return does highlight is the courage and freshness of the GOP candidate for Illinois Governor, State Senator Bill Brady. Mr. Brady has refused to release his tax returns and stated that he has no intention of doing so. He has filed his financial disclosure forms as a state senator. Everything that the voters need to know is in those forms; there is nothing new in his tax return. His tax returns are, he seems to be saying, none of the voters’ business and he is under no obligation to whet the voyeuristic tendencies of the media.

Finally, we have in Bill Brady, someone with the guts to stand up and say that running for public office does not mean that one forfeits all rights to privacy. Asking someone to share something as intimate as one’s tax return is the financial equivalent of asking someone to take off one’s clothes. Such revelations are not to be made to anyone who expresses a desire to be the recipient thereof but only to those who absolutely need such information and/or with whom we have some burning personal desire to share such information. One suspects, though, that if the media were to ask our candidates for public office to disrobe in public or risk losing an election, our dull thinking, power and adulation obsessed politicians would willingly comply “for the good of the people.” Thank the good Lord, in the cases of most of our aspiring public servants, that the media have expressed no such desires. And thank the good Lord for someone, like Bill Brady, who has the courage to say that certain things are private and will remain private despite the Pavlovian responses of such meretricious politicians as Mark Kirk, Alexi Giannoulias (eventually), and Pat Quinn to whatever outrageous requests the media make at election time.