Enron's Political Potential
By Mary McGrory
Thursday, February 7, 2002; Page A25
washingtonpost.com
Rep. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, is against politicizing the Enron matter. Fritz Hollings, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is not.
The day that Kenneth L. Lay stood up the senators, Lay's attorney accused the senators of being "accusatory," as if he had previously expected a hearing to be a fitting for Mount Rushmore for his client. At a press conference, Hollings, in tones that blend a foghorn and tobacco auctioneer, gave voice to his feeling that the Bush administration is just about a wholly owned subsidiary of Enron, the Houston octopus.
With Republican Sen. Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois wincing by his side, Hollings, who is perhaps the least inhibited member of the Senate, railed against "cash and carry government." He rattled off names of prominent Bush personalities beholden to the elusive Kenneth Lay, who was once called "Kenny Boy" by the CEO of our country, George W. Bush. Hollings's roll call included such familiar names as Vice President Cheney; Mitchell Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
The White House sets store by the fact that O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans turned down Kenneth Lay cold when, in late October, he called for help as the great ship Enron was sinking. He was toast to them.
But before that black day, Lay's largess bought him access, big-time, to the Executive Mansion. During the deliberations on the national energy policy, Enron got six audiences with the vice president and other White House officials. The environmentalists got in just once. Meanwhile, in a major escalation of the Clinton practice of being helpful on huge and delicate international deals, Enron was given the highest-level help possible on a gas-plant installation in India. Personnel from the National Security Council were recruited to do the scut work.
It's episodes like this that make the Democrats think the gods have handed them a huge bouquet of roses -- a marvelous opportunity to upset the Bush apple cart with dramatic proof that it's the man in the suite, not the man in the street, who gets Republican attention. But the roses are extraordinarily thorny. Fritz Hollings, bawling for a select committee and a special prosecutor, illustrates the problem. He, like so many Democrats, received Ken Lay's bounty. He tried to handle it in a blustering aside -- "I got $3,500 over 10 years, but our friend [Sen.] Kay Bailey Hutchison [also a member of the Commerce Committee] got $99,000. Heck, I'm chairman of the committee. That's not a contribution, that was an insult."
Democrats are grateful that Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota is chairman of the commerce subcommittee that does the actual hearings. He has a distinctly less antic approach, and advocates a careful reading of the Enron in-house investigation chaired by the dean of the Texas Law School, William C. Powers Jr., that made Lay cancel his trip. Powers called the Houston heist "appalling."
But Chairman Tauzin does not think Democrats can make any political capital out of it. Like most Republicans, he believes the case can be made that it is, as Sen. Fitzgerald says, a corporate, not a political scandal. Tauzin suggests that Democrats are scrambling for a lifeline in the heavy seas of Bush's popularity -- "It's all they've got."
Some Democrats fret that they may overplay their hand -- as the Republicans did with impeachment. An old Democratic poker-playing operative has cautioned them: "If you have four aces, let the hand play itself." In other words, let the press do the heavy lifting for a while.
Bush goes from strength to strength, almost no matter what he does. Europeans were shaken to the core by the State of the Union address, with its additions to the president's hit list. "There was no Europe in that speech," said one European ambassador, "and no Middle East."
And some of our best friends couldn't help noticing that of all the allies he chose to mention, he singled out Pakistan. In a talk addressed much to values and democracy, he commended by name only President Pervez Musharraf, a military dictator.
But Bush can do no wrong. He can stonewall on Cheney's Enron connection and refuse to turn over the documents. Republicans, who screamed themselves hoarse at Hillary Clinton's long holdout on Whitewater paper, are embarrassed by the Bush-Cheney show of concern for future presidents -- but wouldn't dream of saying anything. Nobody's worried that Ken Lay will spill any beans when he makes his appearance, under subpoena, on Capitol Hill. He's in enough trouble already. A man who sends his wife out to boo-hoo that he was out of the loop and lost everything, along with the 20,000 employees whom he bilked out of their retirement funds, has nothing to say.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
