American Politics Journal

Throwing the Baby off the Sled
GOP Spinners Slander a Prominent Donor in a Desperate Attempt to Distract from Enrongate
by Tamara Baker

Feb. 6, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Clear the decks! RNC spin incoming!

The GOP spin doctors, seeking to distract attention from the Siamese-twin linkages connecting Enron to the Bush crowd, are floating the spin balloon that another recently-bankrupted company, Global Crossing, had given support to former President Bill Clinton, as if to imply nefariousness on Clinton's part.

Now, I could demolish this distraction merely by mentioning the monies given by Global Crossing to both George W. Bush and his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, over the past three years, but that would be too easy. So would citing an interview I recently heard on the Democracy Now! web site in which he spells out Bush-GC ties.

Instead, let's go over this point-by-point:

1) Enron and Ken Lay have been connected to the Bush family for nearly two decades -- so much so that Kenneth Lay, who was a fundraiser for the elder Bush in the 1988 campaign, was rewarded with a White House sleepover during the elder Bush's term. No one from Global Crossing was given that honor under Bill Clinton.
2) Enron used all manner of shoddy and illegal financial practices to defraud its stockholders and employees. Global Crossing was guilty of nothing more than bad management.
3) In 1997, Bush's perennial right-hand man Karl Rove (who owned tons of Enron stock until he sold it off before the bubble burst) got prominent GOP activist Ralph Reed a job with Enron. Nobody in Bill Clinton's administration ever got any Democratic activist a job with Global Crossing.
4) Enron's CEO, Kenneth Lay, not only successfully called for the firing of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Curtis Hebert, he personally selected and interviewed some of the persons on the list to replace Hebert. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse! Meanwhile, Global Crossing, unlike Enron, wasn't allowed to select the people that would run the Federal agency overseeing them.
5) Thomas White, Bush's Secretary of the Army, was working at Enron at this time last year -- and at least three of his former Enron employees have now come forward to say that the profits of the Enron unit that White ran were "illusory" -- and that White had to have known this. Meanwhile, no one from Global Crossing was ever appointed to any Clinton Administration cabinet.

I could continue, but I think you get the point.

It's a measure of the desperation of the GOP that their spinmeisters are trying to besmirch the name of honest, if badly-run, Global Crossings, simply to cover up the Enron stench that surrounds them.