The Bush administration's willingness to push the General Accounting Office to a constitutional confrontation rather than own up to embarrassing meetings with the pirates of Enron is the kind of political blindness that creates crises out of screw ups.

        It's the fear of embarrassment that turned a “third-rate burglary” into “our long national nightmare,” and a private infidelity into an impeachable offense.

        If President Bush and Vice President Cheney think the Enron mess will go away if they don't talk about it, its stench will cling to their administration long after the last Taliban cave has been aired out.

        That won't be because commentators like me are thirsting for a payback for the Clinton impeachment. It will be because Enron had thousands of victims whose futures were wrecked by the depredations of the Enron elites. These are folks who watched their retirement funds drop to zero while top Enron executives cashed out their stock and turned on the shredding machines. These are people Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are ignoring and insulting with their silence.

        What the administration doesn't want to talk about is a series of meetings Mr. Cheney had early last year with a task force he created to work on energy policy. He pulled in executives from the energy industry to advise him, including people from Enron, led by the president's good friend and contributor Kenneth “Ken Boy” Lay.

        Enron contributed millions to candidates in both parties, but by far the largest recipient was the Bush presidential campaign, which received about $6 million. Enron spent that money to get influence. And despite Mr. Cheney's protests that the administration's energy policy had things in it Enron didn't want, it had plenty in it that the company loved.

        This week the San Francisco Chronicle uncovered a memo written by Mr. Lay to Mr. Cheney last April, listing eight things Enron wanted, most of which made it into the energy policy. Among other things, the memo urged the administration to reject caps on wholesale electricity prices that California officials, caught up in that state's energy crisis, were desperately seeking. California claimed the state's power grid was being overcharged by wholesalers, including Enron.

        The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said Wednesday it will sue to obtain the records of when Mr. Cheney's task force met, who was there and what the agendas of the meetings were. If such a suit is filed, it will be the first time in history the GAO has had to go to court to get the records of what are supposed to be public government meetings.

        The president and vice president argue that leaders from the private sector will be afraid to advise them and future administrations if they can't be assured of total confidentiality.

        That is nonsense. Can anyone really conceive of a business executive or lobbyist who would hesitate at the chance to offer the president advice?

        What this stonewalling is all about is that the administration realizes now that it was taking the advice of some pretty unsavory and untrustworthy people. Asking Enron for advice on energy policy was a little like asking Saddam Hussein to give the administration advice on human rights.

        I'm sure the president, the vice president and everybody else who ever took a campaign dollar from Enron wishes now they never had heard of the company. It must be galling for Mr. Cheney to remember how he used his position to lean on the Indian government last year to let Enron out of a controversial power plant deal.

        Getting suckered by a con artist is always embarrassing. But refusing to own up to your mistakes only compounds them. It makes you look deceitful, culpable and even crooked.

        Mr. Cheney and the rest of the administration should give the GAO what it wants. Their refusal to discuss the meetings with Enron makes it look like they have something to hide. And there is no reason to look that way — unless, of course, you have something to hide.
       

        Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: dwells@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Wells.

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