By Eric Alterman
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
Oct. 16 — The Whitewater scandal has plagued Bill
Clinton and obsessed pundits since minute one of
his presidency. Al Gore’s frequent exaggerations
have inspired enough newspaper stories to fell a
thousand forests. Even Hillary Clinton’s
commodity trades, which evidenced no apparent
wrongdoing and were made by someone who had
never run for public office at the time the story
arose, were treated as front-page news for weeks.
But when a major story breaks that indicates that
George W. Bush’s fortune appears to have been
constructed on a foundation shakier than anything
anyone in Arkansas or the Gore campaign could
even have imagined, the media says, “No thanks.”
If a candidate’s credibility falls in a bunch of
shady Texas business deals and no one bothers to
look into it, did it really happen?
I’M NOT TALKING about Bush’s abysmal record as
governor of Texas, where he presided over a steady
worsening of the environment and intervened to prevent the
state from participating in the CHIP program for children
without health care, simultaneously offering generous tax
breaks to the wealthy and the oil and gas industry. Those
issues, consistently covered, have failed to impress.
Perhaps they are too large and too serious. During
prosperous times, we prefer our elections to be about kisses
and sighs. But everyone, anytime, loves a scandal. And
George W. Bush, the failed oil man and successful
stadium-builder, looks to be sitting on top of more than his fair
share. But where is the New York Times famed Whitewater
reporter, Jeff Gerth? Where’s the whole Washington Post
special investigations unit? Where is the scandal-mongering
Matt Drudge and the Fox factory philandering patrol? Has
the media bias that has tilted toward Bush during this entire
election cycle silenced newsgatherers on exactly the kind of
red-meat story from which they could not remove their fangs
during the Clinton presidency? The circumstantial evidence
sure looks damning.
AN UNCOVERED SCANDAL
Bush’s behavior while running an oil company and a
baseball team makes Whitewater look like a Girl Scout cookie sale.
Here are the facts as we now know them, thanks to
Talk Magazine and the Center for Public Integrity. They are,
I warn in advance, complicated and multi-faceted. Taken
together, they appear to add up to a business ethos that
makes Whitewater look like a Girl Scout cookie sale. All of
them deserve, at minimum, a much closer look.
The first discovery of authors Bill Minutaglio and Nancy
Beiles relates to W’s late filing with the Securities and
Exchange Commission of trades he made between 1986 and
1989 of shares of stock in Harken Energy Corporation, one
of his oil companies. Bush managed to escape SEC sanction
despite the fact that he failed to comply with the deadlines
written into law. Because of his tardiness in meeting the
regulations, Bush was able to conceal the fact that he was
buying and selling hundreds of thousands of shares of stock.
Because Bush was a director of the company, this
information was something that all shareholders were entitled
to know. Such knowledge is crucial to the fair and open
functioning of the marketplace. While others who have acted
similarly have been hit with fines in the thousands of dollars,
and on rare occasion, jail. But Bush got away without a
scratch. The SEC never even raised the issue.
MISLEADING REGULATORS
Are the mainstream media giving George W. Bush preferential treatment?
The Republican candidate for president also appears to
have misled the SEC when he insisted that he had dumped
his failing company’s stock in 1990 without knowing that it
was about to tank. Bush pocketed $850,000 by dumping the
stock just a few months before the stock lost 75 percent of its
value. Bush’s lawyers insisted that he “had no material
information that wasn’t already out there in the
marketplace.” But the relevant records demonstrate that he
had been warned of the trouble at least twice before getting
his money out. What’s more, he was on Harken’s internal
audit committee. (And don’t forget that this conveniently
ignorant investor had somehow managed to make it through
Harvard Business School.)
Why did the SEC give Bush a pass on this one too? We
can’t know for sure, but it’s worth noting, as the Talk article
does, that commission was chaired at the time, by Bush
family friend Richard Breenden. Its general counsel was
John Doty, who had once been Bush’s private lawyer.
A TEXAS LAND GRAB
A third aspect of
Bush’s business career
gives lie to the image he
likes to present of himself
as a defender of people
and property against
government encroachment.
It also exposes the uglier
aspects of the one
allegedly successful Bush
business venture — his
role in the enrichment of
the Texas Rangers. Bush
initially borrowed $600,000
from a bank where he had
been a director, to cover
his 1.8 percent interest in
the team. At the behest of
Bush and his fellow
investors, state authorities created the Arlington Sports
Facilities Development Authority, which was given the power
to expropriate some private land to build the team a new
stadium. When some of the homeowners and farmers
refused to sell for the low prices being offered, the Authority
condemned their land and expropriated it by force of law. It
did this with 270 acres of land, even though only about 17
acres were needed for the ballpark. The rest was used for
commercial development that made Bush and his friends rich.
Where is the New York Times famed Whitewater reporter, Jeff Gerth?
Where’s the Washington Post special investigations unit?
Where is Matt Drudge?
A state judge eventually ruled that the amount paid to
the local homeowners had been well under market value and
a bit more was paid in a settlement. But Bush apparently
didn’t care. The team got its new stadium and he walked
away with $15 million in his pocket. The entire seamy story,
however, as the authors point out, gives the lie to Bush’s
boast that he wants to “do everything I can to defend the
power of private property and private property rights.”
PAYING THE PRICE
So what’s the deal?
Is it just a coincidence that The New York Times,
widely accused of being a liberal, pro-Gore
newspaper, runs a front page story on Gore’s
various embellishments in its high-circulation Week in Review
one day and follows it up with one devoted to the same
problem of W’s — only this one is on page A-27 the
following day? (The front page held a flattering story about
the Texas governor’s “no details, little knowledge” style of
“leadership.”) Perhaps the media is setting Bush up for a fall,
the way they did when they were falling in love with Clinton
eight years ago. If so, the media are likely to have a helluva
lot to do over the next four years. Too bad it’s the rest of us
who will have to pay the price.