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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (14720)	6/28/2002 5:50:22 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

Where's Bush? By Steve Bailey, Boston Globe Columnist, 6/28/2002 Ten days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with all of America watching, President Bush asked the nation to gird itself for an unprecedented war on terrorism and made a personal pledge to bring the perpetrators to justice. That extraordinary address to Congress helped redefine his presidency and set the stage for America's response to the terrorists. The perpetrators are still at large, but the president's words and deeds were an important first step that allowed the country to begin to heal. There is another crisis of stunning proportions unfolding before us, this one a crisis of confidence in the markets and the economy. Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, and now WorldCom have all become household names - not, however, for the reasons that corporations routinely spend millions to make their names into brands. But Bush, the nation's CEO, has had little to say about it, in public at least. On Wednesday, in his sharpest statement to date, Bush called the WorldCom disclosures ''outrageous'' and promised, ''We will fully investigate and hold people accountable for misleading not only shareholders but employees as well.'' Bush made his remarks at the opening day of an eight-nation economic summit, hidden away in a fancy resort in someplace called Kananaskis, Alberta, wherever that is. That won't do. As he did to such great effect after Sept. 11, Bush needs to stand up before the nation and pledge to bring the perpetrators to justice. And this time they won't be hard to find: They are not hiding in some who-knows-where cave in Afghanistan, but living the good life in Corporate America's boardrooms. The crisis of confidence now shaking the economy and the markets was made at the top, not at the bottom. The decisions that crushed Enron and Tyco and WorldCom were not made by the employees but by the top executives. The most important thing Bush can do right now to restore confidence in the system is to find the guilty and put them in jail. ''The risk of white-collar crime just went up,'' Bush, our chief law enforcement officer, should tell the nation. Bush has a chance to be the Teddy Roosevelt of his time. It was 100 years ago, and Roosevelt, a Republican president, stood up to the most powerful businessmen of his generation - J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, James J. Hill - and declared that the giant financial and industrial trusts had to be stopped. Roosevelt pounded the table, drafted legislation, and directed his Justice Department to sue to break up the trusts run by men whose ambition had grown into a threat to the nation. ''He was willing to put the whole power and prestige of the White House on the line,'' says presidential scholar Douglas Brinkley of the University of New Orleans. ''It took extreme courage to do what Roosevelt did. He never cared about public opinion polls.'' Opinion polls are a part of every politician's calculus a century later, and Bush has taken a cautious approach for economic and political reasons. Some Bush advisers worry that a strong response could rattle nervous markets even more. Enron offered a minefield of problems for an administration with deep ties to the energy business. Bush is said to have made his anger about the meltdown in business ethics known in private, including in a meetings last week with a group of top business leaders. He is said to lose his temper when he talks about the shenanigans of chief executives like Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, who resigned in the wake of charges that he tried to cheat New York out of sales tax on millions in fine art. But in public, all we have gotten is sound bites. Bush likes William McKinley, the common man's pro-business president, as a model. A better model for this extraordinary moment is Roosevelt, the Republican who followed McKinley, got tough on Big Business, and was rewarded with a landslide re-election. Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at 617-929-2902 or at bailey@globe.com. This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 6/28/2002. boston.com