N.C. Sen. Hopeful (Bowles) Defends Biz Ties

RALEIGH, N.C.- Ever since he entered the race for Senate last year, Democrat Erskine Bowles has boldly promoted his business experience. Now his opponents, seeing political advantage in the scandals rocking corporate America, are trying to turn his Wall Street past against him.

Democrats and Republicans alike are taking shots at Bowles for his membership on the board of directors at pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., which has come under scrutiny for accounting practices that inflated revenue.

Bowles' opponents also are trying to tie him to the failed investments of a New York firm where he was a managing partner.

"Erskine Bowles just seems to want to delete his past, or the past 1 years anyway, and go forward. To me, the issue is accountability," state GOP chairman Bill Cobey said this week. "Bad decisions were made. A lot of people got hurt."

Officials for Bowles, a former Clinton White House chief of staff who works in Charlotte as an investment banker, have said there is a big difference between failed investments and the crooked accounting and document-shredding alleged at companies such as Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom.

"This is nothing but political huffing and puffing by people who want to win a political race and are afraid Erskine will win it instead," said Bowles spokesman Brad Woodhouse.

Bowles is the leading money raiser in a field of nine Democrats competing to succeed retiring Republican Jesse Helms. Bowles' Democratic rivals include former state House Speaker Dan Blue and North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall.

Elizabeth Dole, the former Cabinet secretary and Red Cross chief, is considered the front-runner on the GOP side.

At a campaign stop this week, Blue attacked Bowles for his role at Merck and the Forstmann Little investment banking firm.

"The issue of corporate irresponsibility has become a defining one for this period in our nation's history, and it is a defining one in this campaign as well," Blue said.

Bowles served on the Merck board for less than six months last year before giving up the position to run for Senate. He had little say during that time about an accounting procedure that began two years earlier, Bowles campaign officials said.

The state of Connecticut sued Forstmann Little in February after it lost more than $95 million in investments in XO Communication.

The investments were part of $3 billion that Forstmann sank into XO and the Iowa-based communications company McLeodUSA after Bowles arrived. Two-thirds of the money was lost when the technology boom went bust.

Bowles' involvement in XO was minimal, but he served on the board of directors at McLeodUSA. He also spent much of his time directing the investment of $95 million in an Internet software company called Metiom. Like McLeod, the company declared bankruptcy this year.

Bowles campaign officials point out that investments all over Wall Street have gone bad during the past two years.

"The Nasdaq dropped 80 percent during this period. I suppose that the next thing Erskine's political opponents are going to do is blame him for Chernobyl," Woodhouse said.

Bowles supporters also counter that his opponents have plenty of corporate ties themselves that could be questioned.

Dole, for example, served on the board at Gateway when the computer maker sued by investors. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

"Let's not forget that Elizabeth Dole has taken money from WorldCom and did a fund-raiser with the poster boy for corporate irresponsibility, Ken Lay. The Republicans here seem to be throwing stones at glass houses," said Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Ted Arrington, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said the corporate scandals could hurt Dole, as a Republican closely aligned with President Bush, more than Bowles.

"One of Dole's advantages is the enormous popularity of the president," Arrington said. "To the extent that diminishes, that will hurt her much more than Bowles' financial background."

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