A CORPORATE LINE

Like a two-gun Texas sheriff striding into a crooked prairie town, President Bush told the business and financial community Tuesday to clean up its act or he’d do it for them through new regulations and strict prosecution and punishment for white-collar crime.

Tough words, but the bullets in his six-shooters were mostly blanks. And the sheriff himself came from an anti-regulation culture that had paved the way for mega-corporations to fake their earnings, hide their expenses, enrich their executives and hire accountants to help peddle their stocks rather than audit their crooked books.

To be sure, the president skipped his earlier favorite line that only a few bad apples caused the epidemic of business and financial scandals that have undermined investor confidence in American capitalism at home and abroad. His tough words showed that he recognizes the problem. But the weakness of his belated attempt to lead a reform movement suggests that he sees the crisis mostly as a political threat to his party and his business-dominated administration as they face mid-term elections this fall, with a re-election vote only two years later.

Tough talk, but not enough call for real reform. He made no mention of legislation proposed by Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland to set up a new accounting oversight board and bar accounting firms from mingling auditing with consulting services. Instead, he merely praised a weak House bill encouraging business transparency and accountability and said he hoped the Senate would “act quickly and responsibly.” He suggested that he would prefer to see the Business Roundtable, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq police themselves.

His new “financial crimes SWAT team” sounded tough and reassuring, but he provided no backup in increased numbers of FBI investigators and Justice Department prosecutors to bring wrongdoers to trial. New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, is already doing a better job of going after white-collar fraud. The president could well have pressed congressional Republicans to drop their effort to handcuff Mr. Spitzer’s efforts.

Mr. Bush called on corporations to ban the lavish loans they have been making to executives (often later forgiven), but he said nothing about the granting of generous stock options and failing to enter them as expenses.

He urged business leaders to adopt new standards of ethics and integrity, tell in annual reports and “in plain English” how much they make in salaries, bonuses and benefits. But he asked for no limits on executive compensation.

His proposal to beef up the Securities and Exchange Commission by $100 million fell short of increases proposed in both House and Senate. And his suggestion that the SEC ban corporate leaders convicted of fraud from ever serving again on a public company was less than the SEC is already seeking. The agency wants to ban executives who have shown themselves to be unfit. It says nothing about conviction.

More fundamentally, Mr. Bush said nothing about the deregulation fad that helped produce the investment bubble that now has burst so disastrously. Taking the limits off business executives whose sole objective is to make more money not surprisingly has produced and still produces some wild abuses in this pursuit. Republicans led the charge; Democrats often cashed in by going along with most of it.

It will be interesting to see whether Mr. Bush’s crackdown on corporate fraud will go after his former buddies at Enron, including Army Secretary Thomas White, who was vice chairman of Enron Energy Services when the California crisis was brewing.

And what about Vice President Dick Cheney’s old colleagues at Halliburton, where “creative accounting” created phantom profits?

Mr. Bush said it right: “More scandals are hiding in corporate America.” But his words sounded as if, instead of leading true reform, he would rather let the horse thieves take over the job of sheriff in a town still infested with crooks.