The Enron corporation was a platitude with creative accounting. A broker in energy and data band, it swelled to awesome dimensions by leverage and the multiplication of legal fictions; it went "poof" when prices tumbled. In one form or another, this kind of thing happens so often that it isn't interesting. The particular variation this time involved lax accounting rules, paper mache' partnerships and off-balance-sheet liabilities, but these twists add nothing to the cautionary-tale predictability of the affair. Nonetheless, members of the chattering classes of the United States have been seen rebuking themselves in public for having failed to discern the cosmic significance of this very boring story when it first appeared last year.

The mere size of Enron is part of the explanation for this morbid fascination. Another factor is the falling-elevator feeling the story gives to those people whose retirement plans rest on 401k accounts. (Sure the Enron employees who had only Enron stock in their accounts did not diversify, but they were objects of envy just 18 months ago.) Still, the real reason for the interest is that Democrats in general and liberals in particular fervently desire an equivalent to the Whitewater Scandal, the one running gag of the Clinton Administration suitable for a general audience. That murky business deal, involving no great amount of money, became the license for investigation after investigation, in Congress and in the press, year in and year out. If you were a sufficiently partisan Republican, it was wonderful. Sufficiently partisan Democrats today, in Congress and the media, believe that there must be comparable embarrassments among the numerous connections to Enron that so many members of the Bush Administration have. In fact, they insist on it.

I'm not impressed. The great business-influence scandal of the 20th century was the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry in the late 1980s, when another George Bush was to hand. Younger readers may need to be reminded that the financial industry was severely restricted in what it could do and where it could do it until the Reagan Administration. Deregulation, which came in stages, let banks and savings-in-loans set their interest rates by the market, offer new products and operate across state lines. Bank and S&L deposits continued to be federally insured up to $100,000, but the rules of risk management had not changed. Routine bank audits should have had no trouble spotting any problems. Then the Reagan Administration broke the federal oversight system.

If you are going to run a deposit insurance system, you should not let real estate developers open banks and write loans to themselves, but that was pretty much what happened. Federal regulators were hampered by political influence when they tried to intervene. In the case of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, they colluded with the speculators to prevent action. A third of the nation's S&Ls eventually had to be closed down and their depositors reimbursed by the federal government. Scarcely a whisper of this prospect was heard in the presidential campaign of 1988, however. When a reporter tried to broach the matter at a press conference, Vice President and presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush shouted him down: "Boring! Boring!"

Things are different today. When increasingly desperate Enron executives called the high officials of George W. Bush's Administration, their pleas for a bailout were rejected. Actually, the Republic's debt to the current Bush Administration goes beyond that. Enron's business was largely dependent on the price of natural gas, and therefore Enron vigorously promoted the Kyoto Protocols, which would favor that cleanest of fossil fuels. The Clinton Administration, for whatever reason, favored the same boondoggle. It would have prospered, had Vice President Al Gore become president. The rotten borough of Enron would have survived until an even bigger collapse in the future.

Things are also different today from the decade of the Clinton Scandals. The 1990s are strangely hard to remember because almost nothing happened. There were important trends, of course. What I chiefly recall, though, is that months would go by without any news worth reporting. Cable news had the whole world wired all the time, but the dozens of channels were reduced to running stories on celebrities and their pets. Stories as inane as the Whitewater or Monica scandals can attract attention only in a near-perfect vacuum of real news. That vacuum has now been filled. The Enron story's place in the scheme of things is going to be very small.