Oh!
How 'huffy!' <gg>
Perhaps, then, 'Westi,' you may be 'impressed' with THIS writer:
thenewrepublic.com
THAT'S LIFE
Funny Business
by Michelle Cottle
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Only at TNR Online | Post date 07.17.02 [Email this article.] E-mail this article
As if all the questions about President Bush and Harken Energy weren't enough, now the White House finds itself fending off a whole new set of inquiries about Vice President Cheney and the Halliburton Corporation. Seems the energy services firm was among those companies that joined the creative accounting craze of the late '90s. And it seems Cheney himself scored a whopping $18.5 million from an extraordinarily serendipitous decision to sell his Halliburton shares in August 2000--just two months before the company publicly revealed how poorly it was performing, sending its stock price into a nosedive.
While there's no hard evidence (yet) that Cheney actually broke the law, just as there's no hard evidence that Bush broke the law by dumping his shares in Harken just before its stock went into the toilet, Democrats are positively giddy over the fact that both the president and the vice president are implicated in not-so-black-and-white business dealings at a time when corporate irresponsibility is the political topic du jour. If such a thing as the Independent Counsel's office still existed, you can bet the Dems would be clamoring for one if not two investigations. Listen closely and you can almost hear the "We told you so" fund-raising letters being typed up by McAuliffe's minions over at the DNC.
But the Dems may be setting themselves up for disappointment, and not simply because a few of them--like the good Mr. McAuliffe--may have questionable financial dealings in their past. For all of the talk about corporate malfeasance, Harken and Halliburton, the polls remain inconclusive: A Zogby survey recorded a seven-point drop in Bush's approval rating over the last two weeks, but a new
ABC/Washington Post poll detected no such fall. And while the scandals will likely raise a few questions in the public mind about the administration's loyalties (Can't you just picture Al Gore shrieking, "The people versus the powerful!" at his TV set all during W.'s speech on corporate accountability?), it's also easy to imagine Bush recovering within a few weeks--particularly if no new crises emerge. This is, after all, an administration that rode to victory largely on voters' vague sense that W. is a straight-shooting, trustworthy, un-Clinton kind of guy.
Even so, there's yet another way the scandals might tar Bush and Cheney. The sordid details about Harken and Halliburton have already spotlighted a pretty big lie central to the Bush image--the notion that this administration's experience in corporate America made them top-notch managers of the federal government.
Remember all that nauseating talk during the campaign about how these guys had been "out there" in the real world, running businesses, creating jobs, making money for America? Sure, George W. didn't have much political experience, we were told, but look at all his years as an entrepreneur. A hard-charging oilman! A successful sports entrepreneur! The claims on Cheney were even more audacious. Although he had spent just a few years in the private sector--after a quarter century as a political hack--campaign supporters touted him as some sort of super executive. "He's as top-notch a businessman as he is a statesman," Roger Enrico, CEO of PepsiCo, told USA Today back in July 2000. With all the gushing about Cheney's tenure at Halliburton, you'd have thought the guy was Lee Iaccoca.
In reality, both Bush and Cheney were lousy businessmen. Their rise through the corporate ranks had nothing to do with financial or management acumen--and everything to do with cronyism and a gift for exploiting their insider status. By now, we're all familiar with the sad tale of how young W. had to have Poppy's friends bail him out of his spectacularly failed career as an oilman. And as not one, but two, columns in yesterday's New York Times op-ed page helpfully reminded us, it was family connections and political conflicts of interest that allowed him to buy and run the Texas Rangers baseball club. Now, as the story of Halliburton unfolds, it looks as though Cheney's much ballyhooed (and obscenely compensated) performance as CEO was largely a matter of smoke, mirrors, and cooked books. Far from a business whiz, Cheney was at best an average company steward, at worst an incompetent one.
It's not as though this news should shock anyone. Since way back on the campaign trail, a few critics have been pointing out the absurdity of allowing Bush and Cheney to paint themselves as savvy execs (although some parts of the Halliburton didn't become clear until more recently). But in recent years, with the New Economy making millionaires of us all, corporate executives have been regarded with an awe once reserved for gods and rock stars. (All hail Jack Welch!) Anyone with even weak ties to the business world could convince us of their inherent genius. Even now, we keep hearing about how Bush is "our first MBA president." Oooo, really? An MBA! How special for all of us.
Bottom line: Bush and Cheney don't have a clue how to succeed in business without inside connections, powerful friends, and the sorts of gray-area accounting acrobatics we're now expecting the administration to control. That's why, far from wishing the president or vice president would take a more active role in the current push to reform corporate behavior, I'm hoping they clear out and let someone else tackle the job. From what we know about these guys' business track records, I wouldn't trust them to manage my child's milk money--not because I question their ethics, but because I question their competence.
Michelle Cottle is a senior editor at TNR.
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