Pro-Corporate Dems
Liberal Democrats are having a revelation: The interests of ordinary people can be caught up in the well being of a corporation.

January 23, 2002 1:10 p.m.

ntroducing the pro-corporate Democrat.

Partisan opportunism has a way of twisting parties away from their ideological anchors in strange ways. So it was that Republicans became boosters of the independent counsel during the Clinton years and occasionally were critics of U.S. military intervention (sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes not).

Lately, of course, corporate scourge Henry Waxman has been arguing that the Bush administration foolishly didn't act to save the supposedly evil Enron corporation, for the sake of the little guy, all of those shareholders and employees.

This, from a liberal Democrat, amounts to a kind of revelation: The interests of ordinary people can be caught up in the well being of a corporation. After all, thriving and profitable corporations don't create aggrieved former shareholders and employees.

Now, all that is necessary is for Waxman and Co. to acknowledge that corporate employees are honest and hard-working — as we've been hearing in all the Enron personal-interest stories in recent weeks — even if their corporation doesn't collapse.

Then, Democrats might stop their attacks on efforts to create a pro-business economic environment as sops to "the rich," and perhaps admit that they are good-faith (even if misconceived, depending on your view) attempts to maintain solid places of employment for millions of workers and profitable investments for millions of shareholders.

Again, because if a company goes under it's not "the rich" who suffer primarily, or maybe even at all, but the little guy.

This is one reason that all the talk about Enron's soft money buying it attention from Washington is simplistic. Yes, it certainly helped in a big way.

But a company like Enron is important and worthy of consultation on important policy questions whether it gives money or not, simply because so much is riding on it, in this case the interests of thousands of employees and shareholders and the welfare of a major Texas city, Houston.

Given that fact, an administration would be crazy to draft an energy plan without consulting Enron, and indeed both the Clinton and Bush administration's did give Enron a hearing (one reason Enron, however, didn't always get its way was that there were plenty of other interests lobbying Washington with conflicting agendas — which is exactly the way the system is supposed to work).

Of course, liberals will argue that bowing too far to corporate interests allows companies to run free of the government regulation that keeps them minimally honest, and therefore protects shareholders and employees from the consequences of fraud.

There is something to this — and the current securities and accounting rules bear some scrutiny. But it is important to remember that the fundamental reason for Enron's failure, as the indispensable Holman Jenkins points out in the Wall Street Journal today, is that it bet wrong on both the energy and tech markets.

Perhaps with better rules, Enron's predicament would have become clearer sooner. But there's nothing to stop businessmen from making bad decisions, and no way to squeeze the risk from the high-wire act of capitalism.

This is all the more reason that the government should be extremely careful about doing anything that makes the life of entrepreneurs harder than it is already. After all, when businessmen succeed everyone gains, when they don't everyone loses.

Just ask Henry Waxman.