Both parties stub toes on scandal...
By Thomas Oliphant
The Boston Globe Staff
1/15/2002
WASHINGTON
THE ENRON CORP. scandal has now gone through its initial spin cycle, with the following political fallout:
The Bush White House has followed the well-trodden path of its modern predecessors and drawn attention to itself while trying to draw attention away from itself.
The Democrats are faring only a little better. The Democratic National Committee is playing politics shamelessly, but that act itself is keeping it from being taken seriously. Party figures in the Senate, like their Republican counterparts in the House, decided well in advance of last week's feeding frenzy to treat Enron as one of those rare business scandals that easily engages the public and not as a governmental story as long as the evidence doesn't make it one.
When Joe Lieberman and Carl Levin begin public airing of this astonishing tale of duplicity, it is Enron and its see-no-evil accountants who will be in the cross hairs, not President Bush or top members of his administration.
The decision last month to follow the evidence instead of partisan impulse was easy to make precisely because the senior Democrats understood that the dirty and double dealing already resonates deeply with the public.
The need to bite tongues, however, will remain huge, as witness the silliness over the weekend by party operatives pushing the Bush part of the story or attempting overdrawn metaphors.
The perception of the scandal in the White House was basically that it is a business affair, albeit a huge one, and a mess that initial evidence indicated did not involve a single official, much less the president, in a culpable act.
The subsequent problem arose out of an effort to make a great virtue out of that neutral fact. And it was compounded by the classic error of releasing information piecemeal instead of wholesale, in violation of one of the oldest of scandal culture rules - namely, that the released whole is always less than the sum of its individually released parts.
People forget quickly, but the frenzy of the last several days grew out of the rapidly spreading word on Jan. 9 that the various probes of Enron and accountant Arthur Andersen had gone from regulatory and civil to criminal.
That major development persuaded Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and Commerce Secretary Dan Evans that perhaps Bush should be told about conversations they had or knew about with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay as the company was foundering last fall. Their story is that he was told on the morning of Jan. 10, with the rest of us getting the word later in the day.
White House decision-making is often by its nature seat-of-the-pants, but initial word of the conversations with O'Neill and Evans was accompanied by almost a boast that the whole point was that with Lay obviously fishing for help to preserve what remained of the failing company's credit rating, the officials had done absolutely nothing - exactly what they should have done.
Nice try, but that bit of spin revealed the extent to which this conservative bunch is fixated on the boardrooms and capital markets and to which ordinary investors and workers are an afterthought. It should not have taken too many minutes for White Houses operatives to realize that the impending bankruptcy under mysterious circumstances of the country's seventh largest firm might prompt an administration to mobilize on behalf of innocent victims and not to just make sure the financial fallout was manageable.
The administration proceeded to compound its goof by heartlessly arguing through O'Neill that it had no obligation to do so.
The inept White House communications/political empire only made things worse by dripping the news on successive days - first that there had been additional contacts between Enron President Greg Whalley and a senior Treasury official and then that Evans had told Card about the contacts. And Bush himself hurt the cause with a false claim that Lay had backed Ann Richards over him in the 1994 Texas campaign for governor and given her more money.
In politics, you pay for these mistakes. The first consequence is that the administration's efforts to keep under wraps the records of Vice President Cheney's dealings with the company on energy policy have become politically untenable. The second is that the House GOP leadership's long efforts to block a vote on campaign finance reform are in the process of being abandoned.
Before the fallout gets worse, Bush might want to consider showing as much concern for the victims of this massive fraud as the public does. Off the current facts, this is no scandal; but it is a test.
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Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
This story ran in the Boston Globe on 1/15/2002. |
