THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom that has coagulated, Jell-O-like (i.e., soft and squishy), around the Enron story is that this is above all else a business scandal, not a political scandal.

To listen to defenders of the Bush administration, the system worked. For all the political contributions Enron lavished on George W. Bush, members of Congress, and both political parties over the years, when push came to shove, the Bushies didn’t hesitate to push Enron chair Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay right off the cliff.

Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill — who was apparently among those refusing to help break Enron’s fall — memorably put it this way: "Companies come and go. It’s part of the genius of capitalism."

The conventional wisdom, as is often the case, is all wrong. If you just walked in for the last 15 minutes of this movie, well, yes, it looks like our elected officials were admirably resolute in the face of pressure from high-profile political allies. But if you roll the film back to the opening credits and watch from the beginning, you’ll see that this was a business scandal created by politics.

Houston-based Enron’s incomprehensible business of buying and selling energy, broadband capacity, even "weather derivatives" ("whatever those are," conceded financial reporter Allan Sloan in Newsweek last week) never would have been possible were it not for dangerously foolish deregulatory decisions going back to the early 1990s — including a key decision by former regulatory official Wendy Gramm, wife of US Senator Phil Gramm, both of whom have found the Enron connection to be a lucrative one over the years.

The entire notion of deregulating the energy market, which caused California so much pain and from which Enron profited mightily, was pushed by well-heeled industry lobbyists over the warnings of consumer advocates. (Deregulation came to Massachusetts in the late 1990s. Ask yourself this: is your electric bill lower today than it was a few years ago?)

Finally, the scandal-within-a-scandal involving Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, might never have happened if reforms in the auditing industry had been adopted. Andersen, which turned a blind eye to Enron’s accounting shenanigans and has admitted to destroying documents, had placed itself in a classic conflict of interest: it was not only Enron’s auditing firm, it was also its well-compensated consultant. As Jeremy Kahn reported in Fortune magazine on January 7, former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Arthur Levitt sought to cut back drastically on this practice two years ago, but was largely unsuccessful. Wrote Kahn: "Harvey Pitt, the new SEC chairman, was Andersen’s lawyer until taking office in August and, big surprise, he’s sympathetic to the accountants’ arguments."

How wired were Enron and Andersen? According to figures compiled by the Wall Street Journal, in the 1999-’00 campaign cycle alone, Enron gave more than $1.7 million to Republicans, nearly $700,000 to Democrats, and more than $110,000 to the Bush presidential campaign. Andersen’s tally: more than $1 million to Republicans, more than $400,000 to Democrats, and nearly $150,000 to the Bushies. This is "crony capitalism," as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has aptly labeled it.

This pattern of giving illustrates one reason that observers are reluctant to see this as a political scandal. By "political," most pundits mean "partisan," and there is just enough Democratic involvement here to give reason for pause. Remember, too, that among those reportedly putting in a good word for Kenny Boy was former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, a Democrat.

Thus, HotlineScoop.com’s Howard Mortman reported last week that PBS’s Gwen Ifill, for one, believes Enron is "not a political scandal" because it "lacks the ability to become a partisan attack." Recall how quickly the congressional investigation of Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s campaign-finance practices fell apart in the mid ’90s after it became clear that Republicans had their own scandals to contend with. The Republicans soon moved on to more partisan matters, such as whether oral sex constitutes "sex" for purposes of giving a deposition in a case that never should have been brought.

Then, too, it’s likely that no one — certainly not Republicans, and probably not Democrats, either — wants to relive the endless, and fruitless, scandal investigations that marked Clinton’s entire presidency, especially given the need to maintain a bipartisan foreign policy in the war against terrorism.

So, fine. Let’s not have another witch hunt aimed at bringing down a president. Nevertheless, the impending congressional hearings must address the government’s own role in creating this mess.

Of course government should do something, as well, about the personal tragedies created by the bankruptcy — the Enron employees whose 401(k) funds were wiped out by the collapse of Enron’s stock price, while Lay and his friends made off with $1 billion. (That will buy a lot of luxury-box seats at Enron Field, where the Astros play their home games.) But that is merely a symptom. To get at the root of the problem, investigators must go after the disease of money and influence. To do otherwise would merely add to the horrendous abandonment of the public trust that made the Enron scandal possible in the first place.