LONDON: The podium backdrop carried the slogan “corporate responsibility.” But the speech that George Bush delivered to Wall Street on Tuesday ducked more of the obligations of leadership than it shouldered.

Admittedly, the US president faced a tough task. He had to satisfy the conflicting demands of at least three very different audiences — big business, middle-class investors and swing voters — all anxious for some restoration of stability and confidence after corporate America’s recent wild ride. In the short term, the president may have flourished enough quotable phrases about new eras of integrity to secure his “Bush acts tough” headlines. In the longer term, almost all the important questions about the regulation of modern business practice remain unanswered.

Bush’s basic credibility problem is that he is the leader of a laissez faire political movement. He was nominated and elected by people who want fewer constraints on business, not more. Since he took office, Bush has delivered for those backers on issues from tax, labour and energy, to healthcare, government contracts and the environment.

The corporations for which Bush and his most senior colleagues all worked, and which lavishly financed his election, believe in self-regulation, if they believe in any sort of regulation at all. Bush tried to finesse that weakness on Tuesday. But it left his speech long on vague urgings, callings-on and challenges and short on controls, powers and specific actions. Bush’s prescription for America’s crisis is the soft option of strengthened policing measures, not the tough option of preventive measures with teeth, of the kind being proposed in the US senate by Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. As a Boston Globe commentator put it, Bush offered “a rotten apple solution for a rotten barrel problem.”

The senate bill acknowledges the key point that Bush evades — that new frameworks are needed to ensure proper accountancy standards and controls over executive greed. But even Sarbanes stops short on issues such as excessive stock options and tax havens, which have increasingly become part of a spiralling debate in the US. Bush, of course, had nothing firm to say about any of that — no Teddy Roosevelt Republican he.

It was not the first time that Bush has promised more than he delivered in getting a grip on corporate America. It is unlikely to be the last.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service