Michael Barone
Politics of the investor class
The big Enron story is not about political corruption or helpless employees. It's about whether Enron behaved fairly toward investors.
The press has had a hard time covering the Enron story. At first, it tried to apply the template of political corruption. Enron employees and the company itself had made a lot of political contributions, mostly to Republicans, and reporters' working assumption was that the Bush administration must have done something for Enron in return. But it quickly became apparent that the Bush administration did nothing for Enron. It supported some policies supported by Enron, but it also opposed some policies supported by Enron, including the Kyoto treaty, which, as one Enron executive said in an internal memo, "would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative." Enron executives and, in one instance, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a top executive at Citigroup, to which Enron owed some $800 million, called Bush administration officials and, in some cases at least, asked them for help. The Bush administration officials turned them down flat. So the political corruption template turned out not to apply. As Emily Litella of Saturday Night Live used to say, "Never mind."
The second template was big-rich-executives-screw-the-little-guy. Here there were some facts to plug in:
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