Enron will be Bush's Whitewater?

This Politically Dissident column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 33, No. 17 (January 24, 2002). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

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Over the past couple of weeks, several popular media outlets have been repeating a curious claim—namely that Enron will be Bush’s Whitewater. I’ve already noted that I’m not much of a Bush fan because of his Big Government positions, but, nonetheless, the argument makes no sense to me. In any case, let’s examine the particulars with the hope of shaking something loose.

Enron was a big contributor to Bush’s presidential campaign. So what? Bush is a Texas politician, and Enron’s headquarters are in Houston. If taking donations from a now-bankrupt corporation is politically tainting, then why doesn’t that apply to former president Bill Clinton? What about all the Democrats in Congress who took Enron money?

Enron brass got a lot of face time with the Bush administration. Yeah, and? Bush is a Texas politician and goes way back with Enron CEO Ken Lay. If Enron’s collapse is a black mark on Bush’s career, then why isn’t the same true of former president Bill Clinton who also entertained Enron execs (among others)? Where’s the ruckus over Senator Joe Lieberman? CNN recently reported that a former aide close to the Senator met with Lieberman’s staff and “tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between Enron’s chairman and Lieberman.” The interesting wrinkle in the Enron–Lieberman connection is that Lieberman is now participating in the post-mortem analysis of the bankrupt corporation.

Enron had influence on Vice-President Cheney’s energy policy task force. If this is damning to Bush, then why is everyone ignoring the Clinton administration’s efforts to secure an energy deal in India for Enron? If the Bush administration were really in the pocket of Enron, then why did the president permit energy price controls in California, thereby cutting off a potential income stream that would have been extremely lucrative to Enron?

The worst argument and the most blatant attempt at having it both ways is the charge that the Bush administration failed to prevent Enron’s collapse, even after Enron higher-ups made a few phone calls to members of the federal executive department. Of course, none of these considerations stopped The New York Times from crying “crony capitalism” to their subscribers. Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn’t the cronyistic thing to do have been to bail out the faltering company? It would have been an easy out for Bush. Ari Fleischer could have stood up and wrapped it all in nice spin about national security and saving the economy. (Remember? It’s the economy, stupid!)

It’s plainly obvious that this is desperate reaching, just as the Republicans were reaching when they jumped on Hillary Clinton for the twenty-plus-year-old “Jew b*stard” comment. Understand my position: stout kicks in the pants need to be issued because the reputation of the U.S. markets as being the most open and trustworthy in the world and, by extension, the long-term prospects for our economy are at stake. But let’s cast blame where it belongs, which, from the evidence so far, isn’t with Bush.