The question of whether the Bush administration gave away the store in its dealing with Enron is the hottest topic in Washington these days.

Most of the charges being made, however, don’t make much sense. For example, the fact that Vice President Cheney’s energy task force met with former Enron CEO Ken Lay and his people proves very, very little. The task force was, after all, in the business of soliciting opinions from just about everyone about what the administration ought to include in its energy policy.

In the process, Cheney’s people listened not only to the Enron people, but to others as well. I even talked to them about why I felt the Enron approach to electric utility restructuring was wrong and why conservatives thought the Kyoto approach to global warming ought to be abandoned. It is, after all, the job of those in power to listen.

The policy that eventually emerged incorporated a little of what Lay was pushing, but failed to address his desire for top down electricity deregulation. On this one at least, it appears that Cheney listened to, and rejected, Lay’s arguments.

As a result, Bush’s critics are whining that the task force sinned merely by listening to Lay. No smoking gun there.

Superficially, the charge that Lay somehow managed to “name” a new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) seems more substantive. After all, he did support Patrick Wood III who eventually got the job.

But the real question, of course, is whether Wood was appointed because Lay wanted him. Former FERC Chairman Curtis Hébert, who resigned once it became clear that with Wood and one other new commissioner on board he could no longer effectively lead the commission, believes that that is exactly what happened. He has told reporters that he “knew” his days were numbered after he rejected Lay’s insistent demand that FERC mandate the creation of regional transmission organizations (RTOs) that would guarantee all producers access to existing transmission lines.

These lines are currently owned by utilities and regulated at the state level. Enron, like other energy marketers, believed that their regulation should be in the hands of FERC. Hébert, himself a deregulator, wasn’t comfortable with the idea of increasing federal regulatory authority as a way to create freer and more competitive energy markets.

There is no question that what Wood has done since taking over from Hébert is more consistent with what Lay wanted with regard to the RTOs. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that he is doing it either because he had Enron support or because he is doing Enron’s bidding. In fact, it’s going to take more than an RTO or two to help Enron these days.

Upon assuming the FERC chairmanship, Wood made his mark not by delivering for Lay, but by pleasing Californians and thereby taking some heat off his friend in the White House. In the process, the Texas deregulator remade himself as a regulatory activist. It was Wood who abandoned the hands-off attitude that had until his arrival at FERC characterized the Bush administration’s policy response to the California crisis. He imposed price restraints in California and several other western states — much to the dismay of those of us who would have left the solution to the market.

At that point, many of those who are today attacking the man as an agent of Ken Lay were praising him as a newly arrived white knight. He met with California Gov. Gray Davis and left the beleaguered Democrat with a sense that help was on the way.

Even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), now one of Wood’s partisan enemies, praised him through her press spokesman and said she was “hopeful that Wood will move FERC to act, more so than Hébert.”

It is ironic that Bush’s appointee championed greater federal regulatory intervention than the Clinton appointee he replaced, and that those most hostile to deregulation applauded him until they thought they could make political points by attacking him as an agent of the discredited Lay.

From a conservative point of view, Pat Wood is no walk in the park. He does favor mandatory rather than voluntary RTOs and seems to actually believe that greater rather than less regulation of the electric utility industry will lead to increased competition. These are reasons to be concerned about him, but the shamelessly partisan attacks on the man completely miss the mark.