The on-line magazine Salon, has been way out in front on the Enron brouhaha. The other day, they came up with details on the aspect of this case that may cause the greatest amount of public outrage. It's that, even as the company was declaring bankruptcy, laying people off and reneging on their severance packages, it was also doling out more than $55 million in bonuses to its top executives. (Here's a link to the story.)
Someone once said — or someone should have said — that a scandal is driven by the simplest, one-line description of wrongdoing. Nixon and his lieutenants covered up White House involvement in the Watergate burglary. Reagan claimed his administration hadn't traded arms for hostages when, in fact, they had. Clinton had an affair with an intern and lied about it. In all three cases, there were extenuating explanations and all sorts of spins that could be put on the matter…but a large part of the public never got past the simple fact of wrongdoing as defined in one sentence.
Most of the Enron story is too complicated to make for a good scandal. The public never got worked up over Whitewater, partly because so many accusations against the Clintons were unsupported but also because no one understood what they'd supposedly done wrong. It didn't approach being a juicy, bring-someone-down scandal until it morphed into the easily-explainable Monica mess. Enron is becoming very easy to explain in layman's logic: The company went kablooey, the investors and employees got screwed but the top guys all ran off with millions apiece. That's all most people have to hear. There are explanations and rationalizations. "Retention bonuses" — paying top execs to remain aboard a sinking ship — may be oily but they are not unprecedented and probably not illegal. No matter. The one-liner on this one is bad enough that it can't be explained away…a fact that seems to be lost on the few Enron execs who aren't invoking the Fifth Amendment. The one who testified on Thursday was like a murderer standing amidst the bodies, holding the bloody knife and saying, "Wait…I can explain!"
The question is whether the Enron one-liner will be expanded to include George W. Bush or replaced by a one-liner about him — i.e., "Bush arranged for legislation or government neglect that allowed his pals to loot the company." So far, there's no solid evidence of that and I'm still skeptical there ever will be. But if one of those sentences ever becomes the least bit credible, this could make Watergate look like an overtime parking violation.