More models for how DougR thinks things should work in Washington, this time regarding the Bush/Enron energy legacy (also from The Nation website) This also speaks volumes regarding GWB's refusal to intervene in the West Coast energy crisis of 2001:

Bush had considerable contact with Lay two years earlier (GUEST's note: two years before GWB ran for governor of Texas) when the Enron leader served as the chair of the host committee for the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Bush the senior was nominated for his second term as president.

At that time, Investor's Daily reported that "recently, Lay has turned Enron into a corporate bastion for the GOP." After the elder Bush's defeat, the Bush family switched its political ambitions to George W.'s prospects for governor, and Lay came up with the first of many contributions to that effort.

Lay's loyal support of the Bushes may have been gratitude for the decisive role that the first Bush Administration played in Enron's meteoric rise. Building on the Republican-engineered deregulation of the electricity industry that began in the 1980s, Enron got a huge boost during the first Bush Administration with passage of the 1992 Energy Act, which forced utility companies to carry Enron's electricity on their wires.

In fact, Lay publicly thanked Bush with a column in the Dallas Morning News a week before the 1992 election. Calling Bush "the energy president," Lay wrote that "just six months after George Bush became president, he directed Energy Secretary James Watkins to lead the development of a new energy strategy." That resulted in the legislation making Enron's exponential growth possible.