What a difference a few scandals make. When the Enron collapse was in the news, Bush didn’t say much. His friend and campaign contributor Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay was in the hot seat, and Bush kept his distance. Now that several other major corporations have been caught cooking the books, Bush is nervous enough about the impact on the economy and his presidency to go along with new government regulations and possible criminal penalties for corporate malefactors. Democrats will bring an accounting-reform bill authored by Maryland Democrat and Senate Banking Chairman Paul Sarbanes to the Senate floor next week. It would create an independent board to oversee the accounting industry. Until the WorldCom scandal broke, the bill was moribund. Now it’s expected to pass easily. Bush doesn’t like the legislation but Democrats are guessing that he’ll sign it.

This is heresy for Republicans, who spent much of the last two decades railing against government regulation, and it reeks of political expediency. Bush’s reformist zeal coincides with the reemergence of ethical questions about his own corporate background and that of his vice president. Halliburton, the Texas energy company that Dick Cheney headed from 1995 to 2000, is under scrutiny for possible accounting irregularities, and reporters are dredging up embarrassing details about Bush’s lucrative stint as a corporate officer of the failed Harken Energy Corp. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has tried to dismiss the questions about Bush’s stock transactions as old news. After all, it was June 1990 when Bush sold his shares in Harken for a tidy sum. Not long after, the stock plummeted to a dollar a share and the company collapsed.

The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the conveniently timed transaction but uncovered no evidence that Bush acted on insider information. Bush said he had no more information than the public, even though he was a member of the company’s audit committee and should have known the precarious state of Harken’s finances. Bush’s father was president at the time, and the SEC, headed by a Bush appointee and family friend, was not eager to take on the president’s son. Bush is right when he says this issue has been thoroughly vetted and examined by the voters. It surfaced in his gubernatorial race in 1994, and again in the 2000 presidential race, but it never caught on enough to damage Bush’s good-guy image.

Timing is everything, and the voters may wish to evaluate Bush’s credibility as a corporate reformer against the backdrop of his own behavior. A document provided to reporters by the Democratic National Committee points out that Bush was 34 weeks late in providing information about his Harken stock transactions to the SEC. They say there’s nothing like the zeal of a convert, so maybe Bush has seen the light because he now says corporate officers shouldn’t be allowed to “secretly trade” stock and should disclose their buying and selling within two days.

Halliburton is accused of altering its accounting rules in 1998 to allow cost overruns to be listed as revenue on the assumption that its customers would agree to foot the bill, despite ongoing disputes that suggested otherwise. The change in procedure allowed the company to book $89 million in unsettled claims that year compared to negligible amounts in previous years. Cheney was CEO at the time and got the go-ahead for the creative bookkeeping from Arthur Andersen. A promotional video that Cheney made praising Andersen for its good work should surface this campaign season. Democrats dream of the Cheney video becoming as familiar to voters as the video of Al Gore in his saffron robe entering a Buddhist temple for a ceremony that turned out to be a fund-raiser though no money actually changed hands at the event–a key legal distinction.

That visit to the Buddhist temple became the symbol for what voters didn’t like about Gore’s values, and in the context of President Clinton’s fund-raising excesses, it took hold as a powerful campaign issue. Cheney could face a similar situation. It is extremely unlikely that he will be found guilty of illegality, but he could end up with an image problem that is parallel to the one Gore suffered in that it goes directly to the values of a Republican administration. Polls show that many Americans think the Bush administration is overly sympathetic to corporate interests.

It’s hard for voters to distinguish between one corporate scandal and the next. Cheney profited handsomely from Halliburton stock and was awarded almost $6 million in bonuses for his service to a company that is now ailing. “How is he different from the other executives who enriched themselves while their company stock went south?” asks a congressional Democrat.

There is risk involved in congressional probes of scandals, and so far Democrats have been deferential to all the president’s men. Republicans abused their investigative powers during the Clinton years, and they lost the confidence of the voters. Democrats can be faulted for being too worried about political retribution and accusations they are not patriots. The Sarbanes bill appears to be a tentative beginning toward asserting a Democratic agenda in an area where Bush has a dubious claim on leadership.