Who said mud sticks? Bush shrugs off links to scandals

It is one of the smaller but most telling mysteries of the past convulsive year for corporate and political America. How is it both George Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have escaped serious damage from revelations about their business past and their links with the oil and energy industry, not least Enron?

Doubters of that proposition have only to cast their minds back to the previous occupant of the White House. For four years, Bill Clinton was on the rack over the Whitewater affair. No matter that it was an obscure failed land deal in rural Arkan- sas in which the 42nd President lost money. The press, and Clinton's Republican opponents, would not let go.

Consider now Messrs Bush and Cheney. In 1990 (a comparatively more recent episode in Mr Bush's career than the 1978 Whitewater deal was in Mr Clinton's when he ran for president in 1992), George W Bush, the President's son, sold shares in the Harken oil company, of which he was a director, for $848,000 (£547,000). The circumstances reeked of insider trading, coming just before Harken released some dismal figures that sent its shares reeling.

Later in the 1990s Mr Cheney served as chairman of Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services company. While he was in charge, it engaged in some aggressive accounting (to put it mildly) under its then auditor Andersen, for whom Mr Cheney actually featured in a commercial, extolling Andersen's "go the extra mile" accounting skills.

Those dubious skills would lead to the collapse of Andersen's client Enron, and the criminal conviction of Andersen itself. Mr Cheney, meanwhile, walked away from Halliburton with a $20m payoff when he joined Bush on the 2000 Republican ticket.

But the Enron link did not end there. Its chairman, Kenneth Lay, was a personal friend of Mr Bush, known to the President as "Kenny Boy", and his company was a lavish financial backer. Mr Lay and other senior Enron colleagues were closely involved in the White House energy plan drawn up in 2001 under Mr Cheney's chairmanship, deliberations about which the Vice-President has refused to make public.

But has there been a Clinton-style investigation into his successors? Not a bit of it. "There's no 'there' there," say Mr Bush's defenders, claiming that the SEC had probed the 1990 deal and found no proof of impropriety. But the very same phrase was used by the Clinton camp a decade ago – and small good it did them.

One difference today is the demise of the independent counsel, the institution that tormented Clinton. Even so, all other things being equal, it is hard to imagine Mr Bush escaping a similar ordeal had Congress appointed a special prosecutor. True, Mr Bush had smartly distanced himself from Enron, and called for stiff punishment for Enron and other corporations involved in the recent financial scandals. But that alone might not have been enough, given the President's own business background.

What saved him was the tragedy of 11 September. Rightly, the terrorist attacks eclipsed all other news. America was in no mood to have its President's attention distracted by controversy over past business dealings, least of all when he was generally agreed to be a highly effective leader in the campaign against the terrorists. That may change – but not without powerful new evidence. Bill Clinton can only look on with envy.