Missing the Target

Now, it’s obvious that both of these are faulty syllogisms. And there’s no evidence the public is buying either one, even a little bit. The terrorist threat, the economy, moral values–the list is long of issues of greater national interest and concern. The president’s approval rating hasn’t dipped a whit. And just last weekend, a Gallup poll found Americans evenly divided on whether we’d be better off with Congress controlled by Democrats or Republicans. This is exactly what the same poll found last January and last November.

Yet a feeding frenzy, sparked by Democrats and pursued by the press corps, continues in Washington. It has produced several classic scenes of Washington excess. The first was Bush’s press conference last Monday at which his sale in 1990 of $848,000 in Harken Energy Corp. stock was foremost on reporters’ minds. The day before, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle had declared that the stock deal exemplified “the permissive environment” toward business that has been “very destructive and very disconcerting to many of us.”

The barely concealed expectation of reporters at the press conference was that another Whitewater was on the horizon. Twenty-one reporters asked questions, 13 about Harken or corporate corruption, one noting that Democrats intend to make Harken an issue in the midterm elections this fall. Most of the questions were simply Democratic accusations put in question form. Bush’s answer: The Securities and Exchange Commission had long ago investigated this and found no violation.

Indeed, the SEC probe is one of many reasons Harken is not a Whitewater sequel. At the time the Whitewater flap erupted in late 1993, it had not been investigated, which is why Clinton was forced to call for an independent prosecutor. New information and new facts were coming to light about Clinton and Whitewater. But no new facts about the Harken sale have arisen.

The SEC agreed he hadn’t operated on inside information to avert a tumble in the stock price. The price fell after the sale, but a year later Harken’s value was double the price at which Bush sold his shares.

Not surprisingly, the press has focused on the one error made by Bush in the Harken sale and wildly exaggerated its significance. He filed a form notifying the SEC prior to the sale, but Harken was eight months late in providing a required second notice saying the sale had actually taken place. The first notice told the world someone connected to Harken was dumping his stock. This alerted other investors in case something was troublesome at Harken. The second form is a formality declaring the sale had occurred, as everyone already assumed.

The next day, the New York Times, in separate news and analysis pieces on the press conference, cited the failure to file the second form as if it were the only one that mattered. Neither story even mentioned the first, more important form that Bush had filed. Daschle wasn’t assuaged by Bush’s performance either. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the deportment of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are issues that are relevant to this debate” on corporate responsibility, he said.

The Cheney issue touches on another media twist. The SEC is currently investigating whether Halliburton Corp. hyped earnings when Cheney was the oil services firm’s president in 1998. So who should wade in? Larry Klayman, the litigious head of Judicial Watch. When he filed a blizzard of lawsuits against President Clinton in the 1990s, the press treated him as a kook and a pest. He got minimal coverage. On Wednesday, he filed a suit against Cheney. It got front-page play in the Washington Post and for the first time ever, a Klayman suit was reported on all three network evening news shows.

On Capitol Hill, many Democrats have concluded, after a number of failed attacks, that going after Bush is a fool’s game. His popularity, post-September, is just too sturdy. So House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt blames House Republicans for creating “the atmosphere or the environment” in which corporate corruption flourishes.

But how could they do this? Even after 1994, Republicans held narrow margins–far from veto-proof–in the House and Senate, and the president was a Democrat. None of the reporters who heard Gephardt inquired how Republicans had overcome these obstacles, though one asked him to expand on his claim.

As evidence, Gephardt offered a newspaper article with quotes from Republicans favorable to deregulation and legislation that “took away the right of people to sue corporations for stockholder fraud.” He was referring to a bill limiting gold-digging lawsuits, promoted by trial lawyers, against companies whose stock price had dropped. Clinton promised to sign the bill, then vetoed it after trial lawyers intervened. His veto was overridden as scores of Democrats joined Republicans–the only veto override of Clinton’s eight-year term. Gephardt yesterday released 32 pages of “documentation” that once again failed to justify his claim.

At the White House, there is no panic over the assault by Democrats and the press. True, a Bush aide said, the corporate malfeasance scandal is “something we had to deal with.” Hence, Bush’s speech on Wall Street zinging corporate malefactors. “But we’ve been through this before with Enron” and survived handsomely, the aide said, and now any political problem for Bush will vanish when the Senate follows the House in passing a corporate responsibility bill, probably today.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.