Lanny Davis, who specialized in spinning scandals for the Clinton White House, has come up with a hard-learned mantra for those entangled in political controversies: “Tell it early. Tell it all. Tell it yourself.”
The Bush White House, however, does not appear to be heeding that slogan as the Enron matter unfolds, with almost daily revelations of connections between the administration and the failed energy company.
Through testy media briefings and heated congressional demands, Bush officials have rejected calls that they disclose Enron’s contacts with the administration and release the records of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Instead, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer has made clear the White House will provide specific information only if it comes up.
The peril in that strategy, say survivors of previous scandals, is that it looks like you have something to hide and it lets others set the agenda. Since the Enron matter erupted Jan. 9, the White House has continually found itself on the defensive.
“Little facts are dribbling out,” said Davis, who was President Bill Clinton’s special counsel. “What Ari really needs is a sweep of all 2,500 file cabinets in the Executive Office Building to find any piece of paper, any telephone record, any contact with anyone from Enron.”
The White House should provide reporters and lawmakers with all the information they could possibly hope for, Davis and others said, making it clear the administration has nothing to hide. The Clinton administration, too, was often seen as holding back information in just this way, though Davis said he tried to change that.
Many said Bush is doing what every president from Richard Nixon to Clinton has done when facing scandal.
Repeating others’ mistakes
“They are making mistakes that have been made with other controversies in the past,” said James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. “They have not been open and transparent about the relationships from the beginning. They are either stonewalling or not doing a good job. They should know from previous controversies, you get out as much as possible from the beginning.”
Fleischer has repeatedly refused to provide such sweeping information about the administration’s contacts with Enron, saying that would suggest wrongdoing where there was none. The news media, he suggested, would make a big deal out of routine phone calls.
“If people want to know about every contact that anybody has had with anybody about anything, that’s a fishing expedition,” Fleischer said. “That’s the line the White House is drawing, to be helpful, to answer inquiries, without going down this trail that any contact with anybody, for any reason, is a suggestion of something that was done wrong.”
No evidence of wrongdoing
No evidence has surfaced that anyone in the Bush administration has acted unethically, for example by improperly intervening on Enron’s behalf. But the danger for Bush may lie elsewhere.
The controversies that damage politicians are often those that reinforce their perceived weaknesses. Enron has been Bush’s biggest supporter, and the controversy could play into Democrats’ portrait of the president as too closely tied to big business, especially Texas energy barons.
The White House strategy for fighting this, besides refusing to provide wholesale information, has two main pillars. The first emphasizes that both political parties, not just Republicans, have close connections to Enron; the second emphasizes Bush’s concern for the middle-class Americans who lost their life savings in the company’s implosion.
In the days since the Justice Department’s criminal inquiry into Enron was disclosed, this approach has yielded mixed results at best.
Bush at first seemed to be distancing himself from Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, an old friend and supporter. Bush even said Jan. 10 that Lay had supported his opponent, Ann Richards, in the 1994 Texas governor’s race, which was not the case.
Revelations, bit by bit
The same day, Fleischer reported that two Cabinet officials, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, had spoken with Lay as Enron was collapsing. But Fleischer said he knew of no one in the White House who had been informed of these conversations.
Three days later, it turned out that White House Chief of Staff Andy Card had been told.
Last week, White House Budget Director Mitchell Daniels told reporters that he, too, had spoken to Lay.
On the same day, Fleischer mentioned offhandedly an internal meeting convened by White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, a former Enron consultant, to monitor the Enron situation and its possible impact on the economy.
These bit-by-bit revelations have prompted questions about when Bush knew of Enron’s dire financial condition. Fleischer’s briefings turned into testy, back-and-forth battles and their dominant subject was not the war on terrorism or the tax cuts–far more favorable terrain for Bush–but Enron.
Fleischer has reacted by suggesting that some of those pressing for information are politically motivated.
“If this were to become what people have become so used to in Washington, which is a politically charged, a politically motivated effort to blame one party, or to look only at one party–when clearly Enron is a corporation that has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to both parties–then I think people would think that the Congress is not on the right path,” Fleischer said Jan. 10.
Some support the administration’s approach, saying Bush’s people have divulged what they could and resisted the temptation to look for any and all contacts with Enron, as news organizations are demanding, that would be falsely portrayed. The occasional “document dumps” staged by the Clinton White House did little to satisfy the media’s craving for scandal, this argument goes.
“They have done this about as well as one could imagine,” said Leonard Garment, who was Nixon’s counsel during Watergate. “They have been more or less ahead of the game in terms of disclosures. People want more, every contact at every level. But why should they go hunting for land mines with their toes?”
But another battle-scarred veteran, former Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart, said the Bush camp is hurting itself.
Advice: `Welcome questions’
“Clearly they are creating the impression by their public statements that there is something to hide here,” Lockhart said. “That is the direct opposite of what you want to do in situations like this. If you believe everything you have done is aboveboard, you should welcome questions and oversight.”
He added, “If the party opposite goes too far and becomes too partisan, the public will see through it. That is the lesson of the Clinton years. Early on, there was resistance to cooperate with the press on these things, but at the end, the public sees through partisan witch hunts.”
Many in the Bush White House have a good deal of political experience, and some, like senior adviser Karl Rove, pride themselves on being students of history. But they are falling into the same mistakes as other administrations, said the American University’s Thurber.
“There is this perspective of, `We’re different,'” Thurber said. “The Clinton people felt, `This is not Nixon, this is not Watergate.’ The Bush people feel, `This is not Whitewater.’ But this has the possibility of being much larger than Whitewater, in my opinion. I don’t think they took it as seriously as they should have.”
