Gail Collins, Voice of Reason?????????:
It is going too far at the moment to call the collapse of Enron a scandal for the Bush administration. The head of Enron was one of the president’s biggest campaign donors, and we now know that he called two cabinet officers last fall to warn them that the company was in terrible trouble. But none of that was necessarily improper, and there is no indication that those calls or other conversations between Enron executives and administration officials led to any action by the government.
Oh… Never mind. It is just another veiled attempt to push for the Large Newspaper Monopoly Empowerment Act (also known as McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform), after all:
There are plenty of things Mr. Bush can do to inoculate himself against any taint from the Enron disaster. He should embrace campaign finance reform, demand a severing of ties between Enron and those around him and cooperate with all Congressional investigations on the issue.
Enron might seem less threatening to Mr. Bush if his presidential campaign had not received huge contributions from the company and its top officials. The best way for Mr. Bush to minimize such taint is to work with Congress to ban unregulated party donations by corporations, unions and rich individuals, known as “soft money.”