n a spirited challenge to the Republican right wing, Christine Todd Whitman, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and governor of New Jersey, confirms that industry lobbyists and their ideological allies in the White House dictate EPA policy and ignore inconvenient facts. But as someone who served under Whitman at the EPA (as director of its office of regulatory enforcement), I only wish she had been as courageous when she ran the agency as she sounds in her postelection book, It's My Party Too.
Whitman's newfound candor is refreshing, however belated: She now writes that social fundamentalists are dividing the country and threatening the Republican hold on power with their "arrogant" and "bullying" attacks on environmental protection and other popular causes. Although I can sympathize with the pressures she faced in one of the hardest political jobs in Washington, it's not clear after reading the book whether Whitman's environmental convictions -- or the brand of moderate Republicanism she favors -- are robust enough to stand up to the party's hard-charging right wing.
It's My Party Too takes us back to the days when Republicans wrote environmental laws instead of repealing them. President Bush's father kept his campaign commitment to strengthen the Clean Air Act, and moderate senators including Robert Stafford of Vermont and John Chafee of Rhode Island helped shape the laws that protect us from water pollution and hazardous waste dumping. While generally avoiding direct criticism of the president, Whitman's book suggests that his administration turned its back on this legacy when it reversed his pledge to cap global warming emissions, failed to pursue the cleanup of dirty power plants, and blocked EPA's efforts to assure safe operation of chemical plants.
How much responsibility does Whitman bear for the decisions she now criticizes? On at least some important issues, she placed loyalty above environmental principles and provided cover for bad decisions. For example, in June 2002, Whitman, as EPA administrator, wrote a letter to the president stating that regulations requiring dirty power plants to clean up emissions before making major modifications had blocked projects that would "improve energy reliability, efficiency, or safety." Soon thereafter, the agency virtually eliminated the offending rules. But according to her new book, she had no evidence to support that pivotal statement. She now says that during a White House meeting in 2001, she challenged EPA critics to come forward with a list of energy projects delayed by environmental rules, but "nobody ever did." So the rollback of Clean Air Act rules, now the subject of bitter court battles, was built on a lie in which Whitman herself was complicit.
Just after President Bush first took office, Whitman, as his newly appointed EPA administrator, met with her European counterparts to announce that the President would make good on a campaign promise to curb global warming gases. Republican Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Jesse Helms of North Carolina protested, their complaints were duly amplified by the echo chamber of right-wing media, and the president lost no time in abandoning his pledge. Whitman asked for reconsideration, "but as soon as the president and I sat down, I realized that I wasn't there to state my case -- I was there to be told that he had decided to reverse himself."
Whitman is clearly uncomfortable with extremes on either the left or the right of the political spectrum, and her desire for moderation is heartfelt and welcome. But it's just not clear enough where she stands on issues that affect the health of our children and the future of our planet. She says she's glad she left the agency before the worst Clean Air Act rollbacks were proposed, but in fact they were announced six months before she left office. While clearly displeased with the president's decision on global warming, even now she says she "didn't disagree" but was concerned only with how it was presented.
When Whitman was governor of New Jersey, Bill Neill, of the state's Audubon Society, compared the internal contradictions in her attitudes toward environmental protection to the Pentagon's ill-fated Osprey aircraft, originally designed to serve as both plane and helicopter, "but which seems to do neither very well and crashes frequently." Republicans who want to recapture their party from the right will need the strength of their convictions, not just a concern for appearances.
In fact, the Republicans who helped create our most powerful environmental laws were not just skilled politicians but strong-minded individuals willing to break from their party to follow their conscience. Whitman appeals to that tradition when she warns:
The moderates in the Republican party today face a momentous choice. We can decide to continue to "go along to get along," to yield when push comes to shove to preserve the unity of the party and our place in it. Or we can elect to draw a line in the sand, to decide that the future of Republicanism is too important to allow those who seek to purge the party of anyone who is "ideologically impure" to take over.
Whitman had a golden opportunity to draw that line in the sand by refusing to provide cover for rollbacks in Clean Air Act rules, or by resigning when the president reversed course on global warming. Instead, she exited quietly more than two years later, saying only this: "I'm not leaving because of clashes with the administration; in fact, I haven't had any."
-- Eric Schaeffer
