Campaign finance: Exploiting Enron.(proponents of campaign finance reform are pointing to Enron as an example of why legislation should be passed)(Brief Article)

Of all the lessons that might be drawn from the story of Enron's tangled accounts and bankruptcy, perhaps the oddest is that it is imperative to ban political ads. Yet that is the lesson that Washington is drawing. The Enron scandal is said to make passage of the McCain- Feingold bill urgent. One of the bill's major provisions would prohibit groups from running ads that mention candidates in the 60 days before an election. What this has to do with Enron is anyone's guess. But the scandal has indeed brought the legislation closer to enactment than ever before.

It's not clear that Enron's political influence had as profound and baleful an impact as the campaign-finance "reformers" believe. All its influence did not prevent the company from going under, or even get the Bush administration to lift a finger as it sank. True, Bush took some positions that served Enron's interests -- championing energy deregulation, for example -- but he did so out of conviction rather than a desire to curry favor with Enron. For the same reason, Clinton "sided with Enron" on global warming (the company thought it could profit from a treaty against it, while Clinton backed the treaty for ideological reasons).

Even if the reformers were correct in identifying Enron's influence- buying as a grave problem, their legislation would hardly solve it. They see donations by Enron executives as a form of influence-buying by the company. Yet McCain-Feingold, at least in the version passed by the Senate last spring, actually raises the amount individuals are ...