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Based on his Monday press conference, George W. Bush has a lot of work to do in the days ahead. It's understandable why the White House decided to send Bush out to address the press. Given the stakes of today's speech, it was important that he had the opportunity to clear the air on the details of his 12-year-old sale of Harken Energy Corp. stock. Nothing turns the press into a ferocious pack of bloodthirsty piranhas more quickly than a politician changing his story. When that happens, the act begins to look like a cover-up. Whether it is or not is almost beside the point. But it is the nature of Washington scandal. This began to happen last week, just as everyone was getting ready to head out of their respective towns for the Independence Day holiday. Ever since his 1994 run for governor, Bush has maintained that the SEC had misplaced the form reporting his stock sales, resulting in Bush filing the information eight months after the fact. Bush, a director at Harken, made $800,000 on the deal and insinuations of insider trading were made. The SEC took no action against Bush because of the late filing. Last week, the White House stated that actually Harken lawyers were responsible for the late filing. That's about all is necessary for the feeding frenzy to begin. So, it mattered little that the president called for the passage of the homeland-security bill and trade-promotion authority (see how much those topics lead today's newspapers). Most of the press conference was Harken-related. What should be disturbing to supporters of George W. Bush was the aching sense of déjà vu that his appearance invoked. It had been more than two years since we had to see a president start using phrases like, "This has all been looked at before…this is politics." The déjà vu queasiness increased when Bush said, "As to why the Form 4 was late, I still haven't figured it out completely." This response is problematic for two reasons: For one thing, it sounds like a third excuse — separate from the aforementioned reasons — for the late filing. Second and worse for the president, it looked like he — a director of a company he once owned — seriously did not know why an important form hadn't been filed correctly. One of the great successes George W. Bush achieved in the post-9/11 world was eradicating the view that he was somehow not up to the job, that he was dumb or incompetent. A Bush supporter who watched the press conference said, "I suddenly got that feeling that he didn't really know what was going on." Later Bush was asked if he would authorize the release all SEC documents on his case. In a rhetorical sleight of hand that was almost, uh, Clintonian in its brilliance, Bush responded that, "In the early '90s, key members of Congress asked for relevant documents from the SEC on this case. They were given the documents. You've seen the relevant documents." The exchange moved
from a question about "all" documents to a question of "relevant"
documents. "There was an honest difference of opinion as to how to account for a complicated transaction. You're going to find that in different corporations. Sometimes the rules aren't as specific as one would expect, and therefore the accountants and the auditors make a decision…in the corporate world sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures." Bush may very well be right. However, politically this places him in an awkward position when he rhetorically calls for the death penalty for misbehaving CEOs. What happens when the executives in question try to say that what one person declares is a criminal offense is just a disagreement over accounting procedures? And whatever happened to "generally accepted accounting practices" anyway? Four years after the impeachment of a president who argued over what the meaning of "is" is, we now have a president coming dangerously close to admitting that two plus two only sometimes equals four in the corporate world. Come to think of it, that's not the first time that POTUS 43 talking about embarrassing business matters sounded like POTUS 42 talking about embarrassing sex matters. Following the Enron revelations, Bush admitted that he "only got to know Ken Lay" as a former "Ann Richard's supporter" — even though Lay had backed George H. W. Bush for years. And, Bill Clinton "did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman — Ms. Lewinsky." The problem for the president — separate from the problems all Republicans have of appearing to be too intimate with business interests — is that the strength of his presidency has been speaking with moral clarity. Despite his occasional mangled syntax, there was never a sense that he was trying to be cute with his language or his meaning. Bush has tended to come across as a straight shooter. That is the key reason he has kept sky-high approval polls. Yes, the war on terror is very different than going after corporate criminals. Bush diminishes himself as a moral agent by saying that "things aren't exactly black and white" in the corporate world. Such a statement implicitly contradicts whatever stern message he delivers in New York today. How can the public trust the markets if there is a sense that this is a place where ethical rules are fuzzy and murky? For that matter, how can foreign trading partners — and investors — trust America if there is a hint that a numeric moral relativism is the working order of the day? If the previous chief executive's language and personal behavior helped create an anything-goes atmosphere that contributed to corporate misbehavior, the current one has to offer a different example. He must offer clarity in detailing his own business affairs just as he demands accountability from the CEO culture. This is where personal
responsibility rubber hits the corporate responsibility road. — Mr. George is an editorial writer for the New York Post. |
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Bush's address on Wall Street Tuesday is undoubtedly one of his most important
domestic-policy speeches. Enron, Tyco, ImClone, Worldcom, Merck, yada,
yada, yada. The list of businesses behaving badly just goes on and on.
It has, remarkably, become a bigger story than the war on terrorism (whatever
happened to that, anyway?). In pointing an accusatory finger at corporate
malfeasance and calling for strict oversight and stiff criminal penalties,
the speech is meant to introduce some needed confidence into a financial
culture that has been rocked by multiple scandals and slow the meltdown
on Wall Street. Bush wants to convey the message that the American people
can trust the system. 
