[The NYTimes had a couple of pieces on the World Economic Forum meetings beginning Thursday. Here's a weird, all-over-the-place piece about class politics
from today's Week in Reivew] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/27/weekinreview/27BERK.html January 27, 2002 GREED, PAIN, EXCESSES In Wake of Enron, Democrats May Have Opportunity By RICHARD L. BERKE
WASHINGTON -- ONCE they express their requisite sympathy for stockholders and investors in Enron, many Democrats are downright giddy over the company's implosion. Not since Watergate and Richard M. Nixon's cozying up to corporate bigwigs wielding bags of money, they say, has their party had such an ideal vehicle to arouse the citizenry and skewer a Republican president as favoring monied interests.
"It's Teapot Dome," said Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who has built a career on speaking for the disenfranchised. "It's a perfect populist crusade." Though, unlike the Harding administration scandal, no one in this administration is known to have acted illegally regarding Enron.
Stanley B. Greenberg, who helped devise a populist theme for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign, said the Democrats' rallying cry in the November elections should be: "The greed is real. The pain is real. The excesses are real."
And the reality is that the issue could be potent for the Democrats, though some are wary of rushing headlong into making Enron a political issue and caution that the company spread its bounty to both parties. Yet Enron was far more generous to Republicans and has closer ties with Republican officials in government.
Republicans are especially vulnerable because Enron reinforces the long-held perception that their's is the party of big business and the rich. The White House is already a target because the administration is stocked with officials formerly involved with the oil industry in Texas. Even religious conservatives, a powerful constituency for the Republican Party, are grousing that their president is showing more fealty to corporate titans than Christian leaders.
Adding to the image of a party more attuned to corporate interests than ordinary Americans was the recent election of Marc Racicot as Republican Party chairman. He refused to sever his ties to a law firm that has lobbied extensively for Enron and other companies. The latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, published today, underscores the image of a White House run by the upper crust. It reports that 61 percent of Americans say big business has too much influence in the administration. And 50 percent said the administration's policies favor the rich; only 14 percent said they favor the middle class.
Democrats may have the best opportunity to capitalize on Enron if they do not retreat to the simplistic anti-big business slogans of decades past. Nearly a century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt scored by demonizing the Standard Oil Company as representing the evils of the newly sprouting corporate giants — and shattering it into 34 pieces.
While the age of trustbusting is long gone, Democrats could portray Enron as symbolizing the evils of a new corporate economy fostered by giant stock purchases and multinational companies. They can expand their argument and point to other disastrous business collapses, like Kmart, as evidence that corporations are running roughshod over working people. [?! -pk] "If they're smart, the Democrats' strategy should be to make Bush into another shifty-eyed J. R. Ewing," said Kevin Phillips, the political analyst who wrote "The Politics of Rich and Poor." "If they dig deep enough, they can strike gold: that this guy has been up to his neck in every facet of the oil business in Texas, and it often hasn't reflected well in his judgment."
But turning Enron into a big- business-versus-the-little-people bonanza for the Democrats could be more knotty than it seems — and not just because Enron spread its largess to Democrats as well.
For one thing, Democrats can no longer fully disassociate themselves from industry. President Clinton courted big business — and it was his White House that presided over an era of prosperity for corporate America.
There is also a history of populist crusades falling flat. Most recently, voters were not altogether convinced in the 2000 campaign when Mr. Gore ridiculed the Bush tax cut proposal as "a form of class warfare on behalf of billionaires."
In the 1980's, the Democrats' drive to make villains of junk bond trading firms backfired, as did President Harry S. Truman's brazen seizure of big steel companies in 1952. "Standing up for the little guy will always be part of Democratic Party politics," said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "But we suffer from the stereotype of resenting people who have been successful even if they have done nothing wrong. We don't want to play into that stereotype."
There is no question that Enron can help Democrats stir up the party faithful, just like Whitewater galvanized hard-core conservatives. The question is whether the Democrats can broaden the appeal of the issue.
To do so, they cannot merely repeat the party's mantra that Republicans favor the rich, but would have to take the argument to the next step: not only that Republicans are responding to corporate interests, but that they are doing so at the expense of ordinary citizens. Even some religious conservatives have accused the administration of overlooking their interests in favor of big business. Many were furious when, at the Republican Party's winter meeting in Austin, Tex., this month, the party installed Lewis Eisenberg, an abortion rights activist who has contributed to Democrats, to head the party's drive to raise money. Mr. Eisenberg's appeal: he's close to business and knows how to get big donations.
"It was a terrible appointment," said Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. "Couldn't they find a chief fund-raiser who actually agreed with the party's platform?"
On the other side of the political spectrum, Mr. Hightower said it would not be sufficient for Democrats to assure voters that "we're on your side." He said the party needed to take its argument several steps forward. "We need to wrap up not just the corruption of money in politics but the actual damage to people and pensions and the disrespect for workers and the flim-flam of the new economy," he said.
Recognizing that such populist appeals could succeed, Mr. Bush, in a striking change of tone, said last week he was outraged by the conduct of Enron, and noted that his own mother-in-law had lost more than $8,000 in Enron shares.
AS part of their offensive, Republicans are seeking to shift the spotlight to Democrats who took Enron donations, and they portray the Enron debacle as a business scandal with no partisan bounds. In fact, White House officials are questioning why regulators in the Clinton administration did not pick up on the transgressions at Enron.
Dismissing the Democrats as trying to politicize the Enron collapse, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said, "The American people are savvy enough to understand the difference between political rhetoric and fact — and the fact is that the administration did not make any attempts to help Enron."
James Carville, the Democratic consultant, countered that the question is not whether the administration acted to save Enron. "It's not what they did when they went belly up," he said. "It's what they did when Enron had money."
But, like many other Democrats, Mr. Carville is not free of Enron entanglements. He said he agreed to deliver a speech last October for the corporation for his usual big fee. The company went belly up, so he never could offer his words of wisdom. But chances are, his remarks would not have been about corporate greed. [end]