Different Players, Same Game

Chavez has been cruelly taken from them, but what an immense favor Bush/Cheney did the Democrats by putting up Ashcroft and Norton! It's hard to stir up liberal passions over Powell at the State Department or Rice as National Security Advisor, or even O'Neill at Treasury. How could you be worse than Madeleine Albright or Samuel Berger? And who cares about O'Neill, when the effective ruler of the economy is over at the Fed?

But with Ashcroft scheduled for the Justice Department there are rich political and fundraising opportunities for the Democrats, lashing the Naderites with "We told you so," and painting lurid scenarios of the Klan Grand Wizard taking up residence in the DOJ. Here comes the Beast: Ashcroft, the foe of choice; Ashcroft, the militia-symp; Ashcroft, the racist hero of the old Confederacy. What can you say for the guy, except that he's probably marginally to the left of Eminem, great white hope of the rap crowd and currently in line for four more Grammys.

But will Ashcroft be effectively worse than Attorney General Janet Reno? This time eight years ago she was four months away from incinerating the Branch Davidians at Waco and on the edge of a tenure that has seen her fervent support for the "war on drugs," a.k.a. the war on the poor, most especially blacks; her contributions to the crime bill of 1994 and the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996; the targeting of minority youth; her complaisance toward expansions in the power of the prosecutorial state against citizens; and onslaughts on the Bill of Rights? It's a touch act to follow.

The environmentalists see similar rich opportunity with Gale Norton, graduate of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an anti-environmental thinktank based in Denver, Colorado, headed by James Watt, greatest fundraiser for environmental causes in our history. No doubt about it, Norton is scarcely nature's friend. Her dreams are of Exxon's Grand Canyon and Disney's Yosemite.

But once again, we should retain our perspective. Consider, for example, Bill Clinton's exit order, banning roads and logging across 58.5 million acres of public land. Then look at the exceptions: Clinton's ban excludes timber sales now in the pipeline, which can be grandfathered in over the next six years. Other huge loopholes include an OK for logging for "ecological reasons," like firebreaks and deer habitat. There's also an OK for roads for mining and grazing allotments, and for fire control. In all, the order envisages a less than three percent reduction of total timber sales in national forests, which isn't much.

If she's smart, Norton will reverse the order simply by choosing one of the other options offered in the environmental impact statement that formed the basis of Clinton's order.

There's likely to be a big fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where outgoing Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has just done Norton and the oil industry a big favor by advising Clinton that to designate ANWR a national monument would be "a meaningless gesture" that would invite the Republicans to reverse all such designations made in Clinton time. You can read this as a startlingly forthright admission that national-monument status doesn't mean much, which is true; also that Babbitt is as gutless as ever. To have made ANWR a national monument would have drawn a line in the sand, or in this case, the snow, a bit deeper, and made the forthcoming onslaught on ANWR a little tougher for the Bush/Cheney crowd.

What else can Norton do that Babbitt hasn't already set in motion? Not much. Last year Babbitt's Fish and Wildlife Service put a moratorium on the listing of endangered species, and he's smiled on the privatization of public assets through land trades, whereby timber corporations get old growth and we get the cut-over terrain.

Salmon protection? The Clinton Administration has let the Republicans off the hook on that one, decreeing that the dams on the Snake River won't be breached.

Oil leasing off the continental shelf? For Bush/Cheney it would be political suicide. Reagan tried and had to back off.

Norton will go after the National Environmental Protection Act, but here again Babbitt and Gore paved the way, with their habitat conservation plans, which have ushered so many corporate foxes into the coop.

Over at EPA, Christine Todd Whitman may be bad, but she's no James Watt; and at USDA could anyone be worse than Dan Glickman, friend of factory farms and saboteur of organic standards?

So, all in all, the Bush/Cheney directorate has done a fine job of rallying the Democrats, just as the Democrats, with their weak-kneed surrender to the Florida putsch and talk of bipartisanship, have given ammunition to the radicals denouncing the two-party consensus. For the activists, there's plenty of opportunity. Militant green groups, including the reinvigorated Greenpeace, are fired up, and right here on the doorstep is the prospect of a national fight for micro-radio, whose future has been sabotaged by the National Association of Broadcasters. The NAB, with the complicity of that darling of the Democrats, NPR, shepherded through a legislative rider late last year that outlaws new low-power stations in most urban areas.

So we're back where we were in the dawn of Clinton time, with courageous people asserting their rights and defying corporations and the state. What else is new? Welcome to Bush/Cheney time. The basic map hasn't changed.