President's Speech Helped Little (BARF!)

Boston Herald ^ | July 11, 2002 | Wayne Woodlief

[Maceman]

President's speech helped little . . .

by Wayne Woodlief
Thursday, July 11, 2002

With a press conference that put him on the defensive about his past and a passionless speech on the national scandal of corporate fraud, President Bush has whipped up a mini-Whitewater type of issue that threatens to derail his agenda and sap his strength.

His heroics on terrorism are receding from the public consciousness, perhaps, ironically, because of the administration's quick success in scattering Osama bin Laden's forces and preventing new attacks on the homeland.

Now, the president faces storm clouds at home:

• Analyses and headlines in several print and electronic outlets whacked Bush's Wall Street speech as far softer than advertised.

• Corporate chiefs he ostensibly was scolding loved the speech. Investors asked instead, ``Where's the beef?'' and the Dow dropped 280 points yesterday.

  Sure, Bush laid out a few good ideas: Double the jail time for officials caught cheating investors by cooking the books. Also exclude executives whenever employees are forbidden from trading company stock in their 401(k) accounts. ``What's fair for the workers is fair for the bosses,'' he said.

  But that was one of the few lines in his speech that drew any applause. And little wonder. Bush delivered the speech like some bored grad student joylessly droning his way through a dissertation he didn't really want to do in the first place.

  Bush showed no outrage, no command of the issue, no attempt to lead on legislation. Bills already in the congressional mill are far tougher than anything he proposed. They include more protection for investors and would get CEOs banned for life (no golden-parachuting to some other company) on findings of unfitness by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Bush's lame effort at that disastrous press conference Monday to brush off his own actions in an oil company stock sale, investigated by the SEC in 1990, undoubtedly only whetted the appetite of the press pack to take a deeper look at what the president termed that ``old story.''

  He called it ``recycled stuff,'' rejected by the SEC, yet raised in his two campaigns for governor and in the 2000 presidential campaign. Now, Bush sighed, it probably will come up in Campaign 2002. Bet on it, with control of the House and Senate at stake.

  Especially when, as Occidental College fellow Matthew Miller wrote in Sunday's Herald, ``The `investigation' of Bush's fortuitous dumping of Harken Energy stock in 1990 was conducted by an SEC headed by a pal of Bush's father whom dad (then president) appointed to his job.''

  And especially when the Democrats can fit Bush's case so neatly into the frame of corporate fakery, suspiciously timed (even if innocent) sales and the broader issue of corrupt millionaires who profit from deception while small investors across an angry nation lose their shirts.

• A potentially even more worrisome prospect for the president looms in a current SEC investigation of Halliburton Corp. bookkeeping when Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of that energy service company.

  Cheney is stonewalling. But Judicial Watch, a conservative group whose suits helped unearth material against President Clinton, also seeks documents from Halliburton in a shareholders' suit. Good move. It shows Judicial Watch is nonpartisan.

  But what an echo all this is of Clinton and his checkered past, remnants of which the new president swore he would cleanse from the White House. Yet in his press conference Bush sounded like Clinton did when he faced new questions about his role in the Whitewater land deal while he was governor of Arkansas.

  ``This and all matters that related to Harken were fully looked into by the SEC,'' Bush said. Clinton said federal banking officials had looked into Whitewater and found nothing on him.

  Bush said he actually lost money on his sale of the Harken stock. (Never mind that the sale gave him capital for what proved a much more lucrative buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team.) Clinton said he and Hillary ``actually lost money'' on Whitewater.

  So Bush looks bad. He had a chance to get out ahead of what the Cable News Network's John King called ``a moving train'' on the red-hot corporate fraud issue. The president blew it. Now he risks being the caboose.

[Semper Paratus]

Wayne is the Herald's house liberal and goes into Gorbasms at the mention of CFR.

[The Vast Right Wing]

As if the president could give a speech and all the sudden profits increase, bad accounting is reversed and the excesses in P/E ratios of the past 6 years would all go back to normal.

[Paul Atreides]

President's Speech Helped Little

Thanks, Dubya!

[an amused spectator]

Bill won't stop thinking about tomorrow
by Wayne Woodlief

Sunday, January 14, 2001

There he was, President Clinton, playing the sax with a New Hampshire high school band, teasing Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and charming audiences on what's been billed as his legacy tour, a farewell swing through the places that have most touched his heart.

But as I listened carefully to him last Thursday in Boston and earlier in the day in Dover, N.H. - places where, Clinton said, he had been ``lifted up'' and nurtured during his grueling 1992 campaign and beyond - a new thought hit me like a bolt: Wait a minute, this guy isn't going anywhere. At least not far.

Even if he isn't president anymore, he means to keep the heat on George W. Bush; to continue pressing for Clintonesque policies, maybe even to be a shadow president, with the new ``Oval Office'' in that $2.8 million manse he and Hillary have bought on Embassy Row.

In Dover - where, in the darkest days of his 1992 sex and draft-dodging scandals, Clinton had promised he'd ``work my heart out for you until the last dog dies'' - the president told a cheering crowd on Thursday: ``The last dog is still barking.''

I'll say. In Boston, at Northeastern University, Clinton talked as much about the future implications of the achievements he bragged about (new technology resources in the schools, more police on the streets, advances in the global economy, huge swaths of public lands spared from developers) than the past.

Clinton can't run again, despite the hard-core followers who chanted, ``FOUR MORE YEARS, FOUR MORE YEARS,'' in Dover and Boston. As Kennedy said jokingly, in introducing Clinton, ``I think the Congress let you down by not repealing the 22nd Amendment,'' which forbids a third term.

But Clinton is still vigorous at age 54. He has installed his friend and top fund-raiser as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His outgoing job approval rating is so high (65 percent, better than Eisenhower's or Reagan's when they left office), you'd never know he'd been impeached. And Clinton never could stop thinking about tomorrow.

His signals that he'll be an active ex-president and play some kind of role in public life, were unmistakable:

He talked with pride of the so-called ``Third Way'' that he and party moderates championed; that middle-ground approach that allowed Clinton to part company with his own party's liberals and sign the welfare reform bill (virtually stealing credit for it from the Republicans who wrote it). The third way also preaches debt reduction over the big tax cuts Bush wants.

And Clinton's reaction to his introduction in Dover by Ron Machos Jr. spoke volumes about his post-presidency aims.

Machos (an out-of-work father who couldn't get health insurance for his young son Ronnie's pre-existing heart condition when he told candidate Clinton his story in 1992) said Clinton would write to ``a little boy in New Hampshire who adored him,'' no matter how busy the president got. And Clinton championed legislation banning refusal of insurance for pre-existing conditions. Now Machos is working and his whole family has health care, he said.

Clinton beamed at that. And when he saw young Ronnie's eyes glistening in the audience, the president said, ``Don't cry, Ronnie. I'm just not going to be president anymore. I'll be around.''

The Clinton magic still works. After his speech in Dover, he stayed for 25 minutes, shaking hands with the hundreds of people who had parked blocks away from the town high school and trudged through snow and ice to hear him. On the way out, he circled back to take a saxophone from a band member and play a riff.

In Boston, the line waiting to hear the president speak at Northeastern University's Matthews Arena stretched over several blocks, despite the frigid weather. It was worth the wait.

Clinton and Kennedy played off each other like old friends and veteran pols. U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Somerville) made a partly earthy, partly gracious speech about Clinton that had the president smiling and talking about the up-and-coming young pol.

And, as if that thing with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment trial in the Senate had been just a bad dream, the president even made a humorous allusion to his having lived on the edge. ``He (Sen. Kennedy) has taken some risks for me,'' said Clinton, adding, with a grin, ``No, I don't mean that. I come from a landlocked state, but he let me sail his boat in Menemsha Harbor'' on Martha's Vineyard.

Clinton, who came to Boston numerous times during his eight years in office to raise money and get resuscitated from his various troubles, said, ``The one place I always knew that would be there to stand with Bill Clinton and Al Gore is Boston, Massachusetts.'' And Kennedy, in turn, expressed his state's love for Clinton. He said, ``We'll leave the lights on for you.''

So come back, Kid. Anytime.

=================================================

It's enlightening to compare the words written by Wayne about his hero Clinton and Wayne's words about Dubya, ain't it? ;-)

[PogySailor]

Everyone knows all it took in the 90's was for Clinton to break wind and the market would go up 300 points. What's Bush's problem? < /sarcasm >

[SpinyNorman]

Once again, President Bush has to clean up a mess that his predecessor was primarily responsible for, either by action or inaction, and Bush is to blame.

I ask again: if the Harken story is sooooooo damning, why didn't it come up in the 2000 election? Seems like every other aspect of his life did.

[bloggerjohn]

He should just come out and say "I am not a crook!"

Oops, bad strategy ;')