He was not before the Senate Commerce Committee to advocate the cleansing of our political system. But he might as well have been. He was taking the Fifth Amendment and enduring a public flogging at the hands of some lawmakers who had enjoyed his largess, proving you cannot necessarily expect a bought politician to stay bought.

Lay sat through it all without protest and without expression. He probably was not surprised that his harshest critic was a Republican, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, who compared him unfavorably to a carnival barker: "A carny will at least tell you upfront that he's running a shell game."

Lay was a merchant prince in Houston, a patron of the opera, ballet and sports of the town, benefactor of orphans and widows. He was called "Kenny Boy" by the governor of Texas, who has since become president and no longer knows his name. He was welcome at the White House and gave secret counsel on energy policy to the vice president. In recent weeks, however, he has sent his wife out to weep that he is as broke as any of the 20,000 Enron workers and retirees who lost their retirement funds when Enron hit the dust. He didn't know, she wailed, and he has come across as an autistic savant -- brilliant enough to create one of the 10 biggest companies in the United States but unable to follow what was going on. The role of such a genius-idiot was played by Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man."

Lay's handpicked erstwhile CEO suffered a similar affliction. Jeffrey Skilling told a House committee that everything was hunky-dory at Enron when he left on Aug. 14, to spend more time with his family. He sold tens of millions in Enron stock before the company collapsed, but he couldn't remember much else, and members growl that he'll be called back to testify.

Republicans have always told themselves that campaign finance is an issue that turns on only suspect segments of the population: editorial writers, good government freaks and John McCain.

But with Enron in the picture, the subject now has a much broader constituency, especially in states where retirement funds lost their shirts with Enron investments. Republicans mostly tell themselves that Enron will blow over. But some of their own told them differently on the floor. Sherwood Boehlert of New York and Zach Wamp of Tennessee said that the jig is up -- that public perception of public figures as the servants of the rich and mighty could be overcome only by a change in the law. They could present all the amendments and alternatives to Shays-Meehan, the House version of McCain-Feingold, that they could come up with, but they wouldn't fool anyone.

Attempts to contain the Enron effect had about them an air of panic. House Speaker Dennis Hastert set the tone with a statement that made his fellow Republicans weep. "This is Armageddon," he wailed. This is "a life-and-death issue for the GOP." No Democrat could have put it better: Money is us, he had said.

Members were getting an earful at home. Sen. Deborah Stabenow of Michigan reports that her constituents were furious on two counts. "They're mad because the Enron people at the top cleaned up and the people at the bottom got cleaned out. Then the executives tell them they didn't know what was going on, which insults their intelligence."

The White House sent an unintentional but clear signal that it understood that opposition to campaign reform was a loser right now -- although candidate Bush had rejected it during his campaign. Richard Berke and Alison Mitchell of the New York Times got hold of a memo that showed the president wanting to sabotage Shays-Meehan without leaving any fingerprints. The White House denied having any such thing in mind. And yesterday when the debate started, the president purred that he could support either the Ney bill, which would limit soft money to levels Ken Lay could have lived with, or Shays-Meehan, which Republicans alternately called unconstitutional and inadequate.

At the Republican pow-wow held before members trooped to the floor to vote, the talk was all of technicalities, of "killer amendments" carefully crafted to render the bill unacceptable to various interest groups -- gun lovers, Hispanics, Native Americans. The inclusion of any one of them doomed the bill in the Senate. It would be sent to a conference from which it would never emerge alive.

For the members it was a day requiring as much slaloming as the Winter Olympics. But Democrats, seeing Republicans stuck in snowdrifts of their own hypocrisy, seemed willing to stay the course. Enron provided the energy.

"Kenny Boy was a real help," said John McCain.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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