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Sierra Club goes on offense
to challenge president
By John Byrne Barry
President Bush took a break from his vacation in August to visit the Northwest
and shore up his badly tarnished environmental credentials. He came away
with a black eye.
He flew into Portland to promote his so-called Healthy Forests initiative,
but the Sierra Club scooped him, holding a press conference the day before,
denouncing
the president’s plan for failing to protect communities at risk from
fire while giving away money that should be spent on fire prevention to
the timber
industry.
He visited Washington to plug the administration’s efforts to protect
salmon, but was met by protesters assailing him for threatening salmon
(and democracy,
among other things). There were so many protesters, in fact, that he cancelled
his only public appearance in the Seattle-Tacoma area and flew instead
to present himself as the friend of the salmon at the remote Ice Harbor
Dam, one of the
major salmon killers in the Pacific Northwest.
The president’s public support has dropped dramatically, according
to recent public opinion research. Sierra Club Executive Director Carl
Pope links
the decline
to the quagmire in Iraq, the stalled economy, and the beating the Bush
administration has taken of late for its anti-environmental actions.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz acknowledges that "the environment is the
single issue on which Republicans in general—and President Bush in particular—are
most vulnerable." Nevertheless, Bush is devoting attention to the
environment because he knows it matters a lot to many sought-after swing
voters, like suburban
women.
Of course, it would be easier for the president to look pro-environment
if he weren’t simultaneously unleashing some of the most anti-environmental policies
in decades. As Sierra Club Legislative Director Debbie Sease puts it: "The
Bush pattern is to do something harmful to the environment and call it
something helpful."
(Or as one satirical bumper-sticker making its way around the Internet
says, "Bush/Cheney ‘04:
Putting the "con" in conservatism.")
For example, in August, the Bush administration released its final ruling
weakening the Clean Air Act by allowing older factories to expand without
installing
modern pollution control technologies. The administration tried to put
a good spin on
it, saying that "pollution will not increase as a result of this rule."
But increasingly, the administration is not getting away with it. The
San Francisco Chronicle called the weakening of the Clean Air Act, "the most damaging
rollback in its 30-year history." Even the Billings Gazette was stinging
in its criticism: "The Bush administration eased a series of important environmental
regulations in a quiet flurry of late-summer activity, delivering almost every
rule change on corporate America’s wish list."
Meanwhile, Mother Jones and Vanity Fair have published exposés of the
Bush administration’s environmental record. In Mother Jones, Osha Gray
Davidson wrote: "No president has gone after the nation’s environmental
laws with the same fury as George W. Bush—and none has been so adept at
staying under the radar." Davidson said that the Bush administration is
filled with "anti-regulatory zealots deep into its rank and file" who
come from the industries they are charged with regulating.
In "Sale of the Wild," Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson zeroed
in on one of those zealots—J. Steven Griles, the deputy interior secretary,
a former lobbyist for the coal, oil, and gas industries. Shnayerson wrote: "Every
administration rewards its friends, but never has there been such a wholesale
giveaway of government agencies to the very industries they’re meant
to oversee."
Shnayerson’s story was accompanied by a photo spread of Griles and Secretary
of the Interior Gale Norton in the great outdoors. Vanity Fair Editor Graydon
Carter wrote, "They both look like Sierra Club veterans: Norton in
trekking gear and a Patagonia-cum-Smokey the Bear outfit, and Griles on
horseback, resembling
some latter-day Theodore Roosevelt."
President Bush, too, has been careful to schedule plenty of photo-ops
in front of national parks and forests. During his August forays from
his
Crawford ranch,
Bush took a well-choreographed hike in California’s Santa Monica
Mountains and talked up plans to upgrade national parks. These attempts
to look pro-environment
reflect the advice of pollster Luntz, who outlined a strategy last fall
advising Republicans to counter the perception that Republicans are anti-environmental
by showing their love of the outdoors.
For the Sierra Club, the key is going after Bush as in Portland and Seattle,
getting there ahead of him to frame the story, and going on the offense
wherever possible. "Bush is playing on people’s fears and lowering expectations," says
Pope. "We have to counter this strategy, raise people’s hopes,
and remind them that we have a proven track record of solving our environmental
problems."
For a thorough look at Bush’s anti-environmental actions, go to
www.sierraclub.org/wwatch.
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