At least seven congressional committees are holding hearings this week on the Enron affair. They have attracted more attention than the release of President Bush’s budget.

Politically, the implications of the Houston energy giant’s fall may be becoming more important to Democratic hopes for the year, now that statistics indicate the economy is beginning to perk up.

But the chances Democrats can benefit from the Enron scandal may stem less from the specifics of the case than from generalized public sentiment that business interests have too much influence over Mr. Bush and his administration.

That is because, from all that is known so far, there seems to be no real evidence that the administration mishandled the collapse of the company that was one of its biggest campaign supporters.

That is so even though Mr. Bush and his advisers sometimes have given the impression they had something to hide when they apparently did nothing wrong.

In his initial comments on the matter last month, Mr. Bush acted as if he barely knew Kenneth Lay, a longtime family friend. He referred to the man he once dubbed “Kenny Boy” as “Mr. Lay,” asserting that the Enron chairman supported his 1994 rival, former Democratic Gov. Ann Richards.

In fact, Mr. Lay “supported” both candidates financially. He gave more money to the Republican, though Ms. Richards revealed last week on CNN’s Larry King Live that he told her he probably would vote for her.

As the scandal attracted more attention, Mr. Bush began to criticize the top Enron management, noting that his mother-in-law was one of the many victims of the collapse in the company’s stock.

Then there were those phone calls from Mr. Lay to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans about the company’s dire straits. From what is known, neither did anything about the warnings, bolstering the administration’s contention that it gave Enron no direct governmental help in its hour of need.

Some Democrats said Mr. O’Neill should have warned the public while Enron stock still had some value. (As the holder of some inherited Enron stock on which I have lost the paper gains of recent years, I wish I had known that bankruptcy was imminent.)

But Mr. O’Neill said on Fox News Sunday that was the company’s responsibility, not the government’s. He said that what Mr. Lay told him was “not new news” and that all he knew was that “they were struggling.”

There also is the question of Enron influence on Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy plan. It is behind the fight in which the General Accounting Office says it will sue the White House to make public the names of people consulted by Mr. Cheney’s task force.

The task force adopted some, though not all, positions favored by Enron. But that hardly is surprising, since Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney both held positions in the oil industry and generally share its views.

All of this probably would matter less politically were it not for the public’s innate suspicion of the relationship between the administration and big business.

A recent CBS News-New York Times poll showed that three in every five respondents felt that big business had too much influence over the Bush administration. An even larger proportion felt that big business had too much influence over Congress. A substantial plurality said Enron executives had closer ties to the GOP than to the Democrats.

Other surveys showed similar results.

Some Democrats have aggressively sought to tie the administration to Enron. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., has urged a special prosecutor, accusing Mr. Bush of running an “Enron government” because so many top officials did consulting work or got campaign contributions from the company.

But other Democrats, recognizing the lack of any specific administration wrongdoing, have been more cautious. Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., used the E-word only once in the Democratic response to Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.