During the campaign, Bush also escaped tough scrutiny of his...

During the campaign, Bush also escaped tough scrutiny of his business career, which amounted to a string of high-paying corporate jobs arranged or backed by his father’s friends usually ending in financial disaster, before Bush moved on to the next sweetheart deal.

In 2000, the heady days of the bull market, little press attention was devoted to the sorts of corporate insider deals that gained notoriety in the past year after Enron’s collapse. Many campaign reporters saw Bush’s intricate business deals as mind-numbing and thus of marginal interest, though again this attitude didn’t protect Clinton from years of investigative reporting about his failed Whitewater land deal.

By contrast to the media’s Whitewater obsession, facts about Bush’s role on the board of Harken Energy Co. have only dribbled out over the past several years. Following his family’s traditional pattern, Bush has rejected calls for full disclosure and insisted that enough evidence is already available.

The picture that is emerging is not pretty. Bush managed to unload $850,000 worth of stock in a mysterious transaction in 1990, while Harken was facing a cash crunch and was planning to sell shares in two subsidiaries to avert bankruptcy.

Outside lawyers from the Haynes and Boone law firm advised Harken officers and directors on June 15, 1990, that if they possessed any negative information about the company’s outlook, a stock sale might be viewed as illegal trading. Bush, who had attended a meeting four days earlier on the plan to sell off the two subsidiaries, went ahead anyway.