The Bush Strategy

"I'm both a compassionate conservative and a passionate conservationist," pronounced Interior Secretary Gale Norton in late February during a speech at Bob Packwood's Dorchester Conference, an annual confab on the Oregon Coast for western Republicans. "There are better approaches than top-down, Washington-based decision-making to protect our environment," she said. "I believe there are good ideas all over America. I respectfully disagree with those who say that to be good stewards of our national treasures, we must be willing to sacrifice jobs."

Norton didn't elaborate on what she meant by this. She didn't unveil her agenda at Interior, other than to say that she believed Snake River Chinook salmon could be saved without tearing down the four dams that have brought them to the brink of extinction and that the oil that lies under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could be exhumed without so much as a stain on the tundra. But the people in the audience got her drift.

"When you compare Gale to Bruce Babbitt, you know that help is on the way," said Paulette Pyle, a lobbyist for pesticide and agribusiness concerns.

Take those national monuments created during the closing hours of Clintontime. Many right-wingers and latter-day Sagebrush rebels want Norton to get rid of them. But that's not Norton's style. As she told the Washington Post, "I'm not Jim Watt. I've matured." Instead, Norton has decided to leave the designations in place, but she has signaled that it might be okay to explore for oil or coal inside them. That's how you can be "a good steward of our national treasures" without "sacrificing jobs."

These pirouettes set a template for the Bush approach to natural resource policy.

Norton understands what many of the Republican ultras fail to notice: the national monument designations were mainly political fluff that imposed few real restrictions on commercial activities inside the boundaries.

Bush backed up Norton's scheme. "There are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without effecting the overall environment," mumbled Bush in an interview with The Denver Post. "It depends upon the cost-benefit ratio. There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part, the precious part, so to speak, will not be despoiled. There's a mentality that says you can't explore and protect land. We're going to change that attitude. You can explore and protect land."

It's easy to see where this is all headed. The Bush administration is advancing on multiple fronts, aiming to force the environmental community to blink and sign-off on a deal. Perhaps protection of the national monuments in exchange for limited exploration of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. Or vice versa. Some believe that the Bush inner circle (namely Cheney and Norton) is less anxious to drill in ANWR than it is to resurrect old Reagan-era schemes involving the Rocky Mountain Front, the eastern flank of the mighty range running from north of Denver through Wyoming and Montana. The targets are oil, coal, shale oil, and, if you believe the oil industry's press releases, the largest trove of natural gas on the continent.

Another Bush strategy has been to let third parties do the heavy lifting on the most controversial issues in order to deflect some of the political heat. In Alaska, the Bush administration is allowing the state's congressional delegation and governor, Democrat Tony Knowles, to take the lead on the heated issue of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, a scheme that enjoys little public sympathy. Indeed, the Administration quietly urged Knowles to push the state legislature into approving a $1.85 million appropriation to a front group, called Alaska Power, which will in turn lobby Congress and unleash a nationwide public relations campaign backing oil drilling in the tundra.

Over at EPA, Christie Todd Whitman has lived a double life. On the outside, she has sounded like a perkier version of her predecessor, Carol Browner. Whitman bragged about getting the once taboo words "global warming" into Bush's first address to Congress, publicly chafed at the decision to strip federal funding from groups that advocate abortion overseas, and, during a trip to Trieste, told European environmental ministers that the Bush administration, unlike Clinton/Gore, would pursue mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions. Whitman yielded glowing press coverage citing her courage and feisty independence.

Then the plank was sawed off behind her. Bush announced that there would be no carbon caps and told Whitman to stop referring to carbon dioxide as a "pollutant." Dick Cheney was rolled out of the hospital in time to do damage control, saying that Whitman had merely been a "good soldier" attempting to defend a "misguided" policy. Then Whitman herself was ushered forward to make a public retraction. She cited the looming energy crisis as the rationale for continued US intransigence on the build-up of greenhouse gases.

The whole thing looked silly and amateurish. But it was actually a calculated maneuver. The Bush strategy is to hype up the California power crunch into a national energy emergency, which they intend to use to advance their agenda on multiple fronts: increased drilling and exploration, suspension of clean air rules, new tax credits for oil and gas companies, and more subsidies for nuclear power. The CO2 retreat served as a kind of public sacrifice to illustrate their seriousness.

Less widely reported is Whitman's move to reduce existing air quality standards in the Great Lakes region. On March 18, Whitman announced that the EPA would relax pollution rules for gasoline in Chicago and Milwaukee. Whitman said the move was needed in order to keep gas prices from "spiking" this summer. Of course, this merely creates another incentive for the oil and companies to price gouge and offer up environmental regulations as a handy scapegoat.

But there's an insidious problem for the Bush gang that resides within their own party. What the Republican leadership, in a blind fervor to repay its corporate underwriters, ignores at its peril is the growing sentiment toward environmental protection within the rank-and-file of their own party. Already, Republican senators Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, James Jeffords, and Susan Collins have already chided some of the moves as misguided and dangerous for the future political health of the party--it took nearly four years to hear similar caveats about Clinton from Democrats.

Polls show that even Republicans oppose drilling in ANWR and that more than 50% support strengthening laws that have long been bugaboos of the industrial right-wing, such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. The evidence for this can be seen in the growth of a new environmental group that is already putting George Bush's feet to the fire: Republicans for Environmental Protection. These are really Republicans and are hard core environmentalists. And they are gaining more clout inside the party with each Bush misstep.

--Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn. The above article is a very condensed version of "Bush and the Greens: the Early Days," which appeared in the April 4 issue of the Anderson Valley Advertiser.