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Analysis
Coming Attractions of the Fall Campaign
Video of Cheney Touting Arthur Andersen Surfaces as Parties Seek Edge on Corporate Crackdown
By: Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Chief Political Correspondent
Thursday, July 11, 2002; 12:22 PM
With both major parties parrying for the upper hand in Washington this week in the ever-widening corporate scandal, campaign operatives and consultants are busy preparing ads and talking points. Both are declaring that their response to the scandal will lead them to victory in November elections.
Much is at stake here, given the slight majorities in both chambers. Republicans are holding out hope that their candidates can ride the coattails of a president with a seemingly unshakable 70-percent-plus approval rating. Democrats are praying that one of the more enduring occurrences in electoral politics — the first-term president's party losing seats in Congress in midterm elections-holds.
At a briefing for reporters on Wednesday, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee executive director Howard Wolfson flatly declared that the party had found its magic bullet. The way Wolfson sees it, every single Republican up for election will be on the defensive this November on the issue of corporate responsibility, while 'I can't think of a single Democratic candidate who would be vulnerable on this issue.'
Wolfson's aides passed out a stack of paperwork to reporters entering the briefing room — clips from House races around the country that show Democratic candidates already taking the corporate responsibility debate to their GOP opponents and a backgrounder on corporate responsibility legislation that Republicans have torpedoed in recent months. The DCCC also unveiled on Wednesday a new Web site,
investorsbillofrights.com 'which highlights the ways in which Democratic Members of Congress and Democratic candidates for Congress are leading the way in the fight for corporate accountability,' according to a blurb on the home page.
Wolfson argued that right-wingers in the House have already rejected some of the same provisions President Bush endorsed in his speech on Wall Street on Tuesday.
'We are on the side of investors; they are on the side of corporate malfeasance,' he said. '[The House Republicans] are on the record as opposing those initiatives proposed by the president yesterday-as tepid as they were.'
It also bears mentioning that a new videotape has, shall we say, emerged of Vice President Cheney, back in his Halliburton days, praising company auditor Arthur Andersen. (You can view the video on the BBC's Web site. Hint, the Cheney portion is near the end).
Cheney is seen saying, 'I get good advice, if you will, from their people, based upon how we are doing business and how we are operating, over and above the normal, by-the-books auditing arrangement.'
Don't be surprised if Democrats try to make voters very familiar with this tape soon. Arthur Andersen was convicted recently of obstruction of justice for shredding documents in the Enron investigation.
'I have heard talk among some Democrats – Democratic groups – of taking this and using it as an ad for the fall,' one senior Democratic official in Washington said today.
Meanwhile, a liberal advocacy group called American Family Voices, began running an ad on New York and Washington area cable systems on Tuesday, with the following script:
'Remember the saying about foxes guarding the henhouse…well guess what's happening in Washington.
President Bush says he's getting tough on corporate fraud. But look at the record. Bush played a key role at Harken Energy – they used Enron style accounting to hide losses…
Bush sold out early.
The Bush team?
Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton …more Enron style accounting.
And Harvey Pitt – the accounting industry's top lawyer.
Bush thinks tough talk can hide the record…that's sly – like a fox.
American Family Values is run by Michael Lux, who formerly worked in the Clinton White House's Public Liaison Office. He has also worked for the liberal advocacy group People For the American Way
The Republicans: Uh, We Don't Think So
Republicans reply that the old Democrat-labor/Republican-big business paradigm is outdated and simplistic. Wolfson himself worked for a candidate, Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2000, who had to answer questions about her own magnificently profitable experience on Wall Street. And you better believe the GOP has a thick file on Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who made millions by cashing out on his Global Crossing stock shortly before the company tanked.
'The question is: Where does their moral authority come from on this issue?' asked Kevin Sheridan, a spokesman for the RNC, in an interview on Wednesday. 'The hypocrisy is pretty thick when you've got people like Terry McAuliffe spouting off all that rhetoric like that.' Sheridan blamed a desperate, agenda-less Democratic party full of leaders (think Gephardt, Daschle) exploiting bad news as a gimmick to bolster their presidential aspirations.
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) echoed the same sentiment at a press conference the other day, suggestion that Democrats were just playing politics and proclaiming in that thick southern drawl that he just wished they'd stop it.
Politics? No!
Was it a) politics? or b) just plain coincidence? that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable just happened to come out one day before the president's big speech on Wall Street backing big reform for big business.
If you answered 'just plain coincidence,' consider this: the Chamber's PAC gave nearly nine times as much money – $366,483 to $41,500 – to individual GOP congressional candidates in the current and previous election cycle than to Democrats, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics
Linda Rozett, a Chamber spokeswoman, said that there was no coordination with the White House and that the organization simply went through the list of proposals from both sides, picked the ones it liked and timed its announcement according to the news cycle.
The Center's Web site also details giving by such corporate giants as WorldCom, which has been quite generous to both political parties. Under the WorldCom section, the site notes an interesting comment House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt made to reporters on June 26: 'All you have to do is follow the money. It leads right to the Republican party.' But do a little more web surfing on the site and you'll get to a list that shows Gephardt snagging $3,000 from WorldCom this election cycle.
One school of thought says you can't hold it against a politician for taking contributions from a company that later turns out to be a scofflaw. But isn't that the point of Gephardt's quote? The Democrats can't have it both ways.
Vulnerable Democrats
The good people at The Cook Political Report don't think the Democrats have a slam dunk on this issue, nor do they agree with Wolfson's assessment that no Democratic candidate could be put on the defensive by it.
Take the Colorado Senate race where Republican Wayne Allard is talking up the fact that Democratic opponent Tom Strickland worked as a lobbyist for Global Crossing in the late 1990s. Or consider the potential vulnerability of Erskine Bowles, President Clinton's former chief of staff, who worked for New York finance firm Forstmann Little (owner of XO Communications, a huge telecom that just filed for bankruptcy) and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wall Street for his likely match-up with Elizabeth Dole in the North Carolina Senate race.
The Democrats, Charlie Cook said, should focus on their historical advantage with voters on questions of keeping big business in check rather than on the specifics of scandal, which could come back to bite them.
'They need to be saying, 'Who do you trust more to go after the rogue elements and keep it on that theme,' Cook said.
The President: Let the Games Begin
Whether the public is paying any attention to this or is just enjoying the balmy summer, the fun has begun for America's political writers. Forced for so long to play the equivalent of basketball's sixth man, they are finally getting their turn in the spotlight.
It started on Monday when the White House called a rare press conference, only to have the president look unprepared for the predictable onslaught of questions about his business dealings as a director of the Harken Energy Corporation more than a decade ago.
Asked to explain questions that have resurfaced about an SEC investigation of Harken more than a decade ago, the president answered: 'In the corporate world, some things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures.' He called the SEC investigation into his late reporting of his sale of Harken stock, 'an honest disagreement of accounting procedures.'
One could imagine fallen WorldCom stars Bernard J. Ebbers and Scott Sullivan might have made the same point had they not been down the street taking the Fifth before a Senate committee that same day.
Asked if he'd allow the SEC to release all the investigatory documents, Bush asserted that reporters had seen all of the 'relevant' data. Relevant, of course, is a subjective term. Thus reporters will never know unless the documents are released.
And grappling with a question about the White House's shifting explanations of why he disclosed the sale of more than $800,000 stock 34 weeks late, Bush said, 'I still haven't figured it out completely.'
Well, Mr. President, neither have we.
© 2002 Washington Post Newsweek Interactive
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TAC: Well folks, let's just cross our fingers and hope that Willie takes enough time to pull up his britches and give a sigh of relief :( No, not that kind fellows! :) and that he hasn't been brought into the frey by the right wing zealots and crooks, hahahaha.
TheAZCowBoy,
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