Enron: Bush's Biggest Success

The coverage over the last two days of the Enron verdicts has seemed like a story in a time capsule. How long ago was that? Seems like ages. What's most interesting about the media coverage is how devoid of political context it is. The New York Times alludes to the atmosphere of the late 1990s, but that really misses the point. (It even makes the implicit suggestion that this scandal was really "Clinton" era.) True, the GOP Congress's reckless deregulation, following upon two decades of escalating obliviousness by the federal government, played a significant role. But nowhere is it noted that Ken Lay and George Bush were best friends and that Enron was Bush's primary political benefactor prior to its fall. Ken Lay came within a hair of being Bush's first Treasury secretary.

When the Enron story originally broke, the big media debate was this: would the press report this as a story of the corrupt interaction of corporate and political elites, or just as a business story, i.e., one company gone uniquely wrong? Bush was so obsessed with getting this story off the front pages that he ratcheted up a previously nonexistent conflict with Iraq. He knew that if Enron dominated the headlines, he'd likely lose Congress in 2002 and face endless investigations of his own role in giving Enron cover for its crimes. Hence the political backdrop for the start of this war. Remember that Bush made his famous "Axis of Evil" state of the union speech in January 2002, just weeks after the Enron story broke. A few months later we got the official Bush doctrine of "preemption," and by October Congress was voting on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq. The news cycle that dominated the year became Iraq, rather than corporate corruption. In the long run, of course, this became a trap for Bush. But it's easy to forget that, first, Iraq saved Bush's presidency.

Absolutely no mention of that today in the press, of course. One day this should be recorded as Bush's biggest success: he won the media debate over Enron without anyone managing to notice.