President Bush won't be able to cast himself as a serious reformer of the scandalous culture of Wall Street as long as the culture of his own administration is in question. The president who came to office bragging about the business experience he and his inner circle would bring to the White House now bristles at fair questions about that corporate history. It will take more than a couple of high-minded speeches to erase the impression that the president and many other top administration officials are too close, personally and philosophically, to the rapacious business leaders, compromised auditors and cynical stock touters whose lack of ethics led to the mass exodus of investor confidence in the markets.

For example, the best idea in the president's Tuesday speech on corporate reform was the creation of a new Justice Department "SWAT team" concentrating on financial crimes. However, the SWAT team will be led by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, who made his name as a private attorney defending big-money clients against charges of fraud and white-collar crime. Thompson hardly has the experience or mind-set to bring credibility to the new effort. In any case, the tougher criminal penalties the president proposed won't provide much deterrence as long as crooked executives have high-powered lawyers like Thompson to get them off the hook. Maybe the president should have proposed that white-collar criminals be represented by public defenders, just like people accused of stealing $100 instead of embezzling $100-million.

Meanwhile, the president continues to stand by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, who formerly represented top accounting firms regulated by the SEC. Pitt came to office promising a kinder, gentler regulatory atmosphere in which the accounting industry would view the SEC as a "partner." His recent effort to recast himself as a regulatory watchdog isn't fooling anybody.

Then there are the questions that go to the very top of the administration. The recent corporate histories of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney no longer are the unalloyed political assets they once seemed to be.

Halliburton Co., the Dallas-based energy services company, is under investigation for alleged Enron-style accounting irregularities that occurred while Cheney was its CEO. At least Cheney has had the good sense to avoid any press conferences that could darken the cloud Halliburton has hung over his head. He should have advised the president to skip Monday's hastily arranged press conference, at which he gave what the New York Times termed "vague and dismissive" responses to questions about his tenure on the board of Harken Energy Corp.

The New York Times was being kind. Some of the president's efforts to explain away his behavior on Harken's board have been positively Clintonian.

Mr. Bush claimed for years that he disclosed a 1990 sale of Harken stock in a proper and timely manner, but that SEC regulators somehow lost the paperwork. A few days ago, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer changed that story, blaming Harken's lawyers for failing to disclose the sale as required by law. Monday, the president said he "still (hasn't) figured it out completely."

The issue is important because Mr. Bush sold more than $800,000 worth of Harken stock just before the company announced bad news that lowered its value. Serious regulators would want to satisfy themselves that no one had tried to conceal stock sales based on inside information. Twelve years seems like enough time for Mr. Bush to figure out why he was eight months late in reporting his stock sale.

The president sounded even more like his predecessor (or an Enron executive or an Arthur Andersen accountant) when he tried to defend the questionable bookkeeping that led the pre-Pitt SEC to require Harken to restate its earnings while he was on the board. "In the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures," he said.

A day later, the president had regained his bearings and recast himself as a Wall Street reformer, but investors weren't immediately buying it. A more credible set of proposed regulatory reforms might have given the markets a needed jolt. Instead, the markets sank even lower after a speech that was long on rhetoric and short on new ideas. His call to "reaffirm the basic principles and rules that make capitalism work" rang hollow a day after asserting that principles and rules don't always apply to accounting procedures.

If the president were serious about reform, he could simply have endorsed the Senate's Sarbanes legislation, which would end the most egregious conflicts that major accounting firms and stock analysts have created for themselves. Instead, the speech sounded more like an exercise in political damage-control. The would-be enforcers at Justice, the SEC and elsewhere in the administration won't get serious about reform until the president shows that he is.

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