Political use of Enron a scandal in itself. (Commentary).

TALK about the sinister influence of special interests.

Throughout the capital nefarious elements have been trying to twist the political debate to their own selfish advantage. From the largest bankruptcy in American history -- a financial scandal that shattered the lives of thousands -- they hope to build a platform for their narrow personal and professional agendas.

Who are these nefarious elements? Well, there's me, for starters -- and hundreds like me. Political journalists cast an eye over the sprawling, reeking mess of Enron Corp. and burn with envy for our brothers and sisters on the financial beats.

The war on terror has dipped into a temporary lull. The president's domestic agenda is stalled, and not terribly exciting in any case. The most consequential issue on the congressional docket -- the reauthorization of welfare reform -- is liable to pass without a peep (poor people don't have lobbyists).

If for no other reason than to relieve the tedium, Washington hacks ache for Enron to swell into a political scandal, a Whitewater of flood-like dimensions.

And we are not alone.

Perpetual frustration

Washington is also full of hobbyists in the arcane pastime of campaign-finance reform. For these perpetually frustrated people, Enron "is a huge development," says Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who is a primary cosponsor of campaign-finance legislation in the House of Representatives.

Last year's campaign finance scandal (you remember: something about presidential pardons and a financier named Marc Rich and a songwriting ex-wife) helped inspire the Senate to pass its own version of Shays' bill.

And with a dozen congressional committees poking through Enron's ruins, some sort of legislative response is inevitable, even beyond pension reform and corporate disclosure rules.

Campaign-finance reform comes ready-made as a political antidote to the disaster of Enron. There's only one problem: Enron's collapse tells us almost nothing about campaign finance.

"What happened to Enron and what campaign finance reform involves are two utterly separate things," says James Bopp, general counsel for the James Madison Center, an anti-reform group.

As Bopp and other opponents point out, the premise of campaign-finance reform is that the existing system is legalized bribery. Rich interests pass money to politicians, who then do the bidding of their puppet masters. But if this is the way the system is supposed to work -- as reformers allege -- then in the case of Enron the system failed spectacularly. After the company and its employees gave more than $2.4 million in contributions to federal candidates in 2000, Enron executives were unable to mobilize a federal rescue of their doomed company.

Payback or paralysis?

If anything, Enron's bankruptcy, and the company's failure to buy federal intervention on its behalf, demonstrates one of the present system's few virtues: transparency. With little effort, anyone can find how much anybody else contributed to any candidate and can then determine what if any special favors the contribution bought.

Congress could improve the system's transparency. Genuine reform would eliminate the lag time between receiving a contribution and reporting it.

The Federal Election Commission, an understaffed and under-financed bureaucratic backwater, could at the very least be brought up to Postal Service levels of efficiency. Will this happen? It would cost money, which makes it unlikely. What makes it even more unlikely is that real reform would deflect attention from the irrelevant obsessions of today's self-styled reformers -- this unlikely cabal of Washington special interests that would use the calamity of Enron for their own political ends.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.