If you believe President Bush, Kenneth Lay--one of his top financial backers and his "good friend"--was merely an equal-opportunity corrupter of our political system, buying off Democrats and Republicans as needed. It is a convenient claim designed to unlink Bush from the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
But, as the good ol' boys in Texas--and now Bush spokesman Ari Fleisher--like to say, "That dog won't hunt."
On Friday, Bush attempted to distance himself from the Enron scandal by stating that CEO Lay "was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994," obscuring the fact that Lay gave Bush three times as much money as he did the Democratic gubernatorial incumbent whom Bush was trying to unseat. Bush added that he really did not get to "know" Lay--the man he nicknamed "Kenny Boy"--until after he won the governor's race.
I can't speak to the varying levels of intimacy of their relationship, but Bush had considerable contact with Lay two years earlier when the Enron leader served as the chair of the host committee for the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Bush the senior was nominated for his second term as president.
At that time, Investor's Daily reported that "recently, Lay has turned Enron into a corporate bastion for the GOP." After the elder Bush's defeat, the Bush family switched its political ambitions to George W.'s prospects for governor, and Lay came up with the first of many contributions to that effort.
Lay's loyal support of the Bushes may have been gratitude for the decisive role that the first Bush administration played in Enron's meteoric rise. Building on the Republican-engineered deregulation of the electricity industry that began in the 1980s, Enron got a huge boost during the first Bush administration with passage of the 1992 Energy Act, which forced utility companies to carry Enron's electricity on their wires.
In fact, Lay publicly thanked Bush with a column in the Dallas Morning News a week before the 1992 election. Calling Bush "the energy president," Lay wrote that "just six months after George Bush became president, he directed Energy Secretary James Watkins to lead the development of a new energy strategy." That resulted in the legislation making Enron's exponential growth possible.
Lay was effusive in expressing his gratitude, writing that the Bush "strategy is the most ambitious and sweeping energy plan ever proposed."
