The GOP needs Christie Whitman's political advice like Catherine Zeta Jones needs her beauty tips.
Posted on 01/31/2005 10:01:14 PM PST by Former Military Chick
Christie Whitman emerged from her first meeting with President-elect George Bush in 2000 full of optimism and convinced of his determination to build a positive environmental "legacy" - a belief reinforced moments later when Karl Rove took her aside and confided, flatteringly, that as the boss of the Environmental Protection Agency, she would be one of just three cabinet-level officers who would help determine whether the president would be re-elected in 2004. This she took to mean that "the work I would do in building a strong record on the environment would help the president build on his base by attracting moderate voters."
"As it turned out," she now concedes in her just-published political memoir, "It's My Party Too," "I don't seem to have understood Karl correctly."
In fact, she misunderstood him completely. Why she did so is one of the many puzzles in this interesting but often disingenuous and frustrating book. A cursory check would have revealed that Mr. Rove had no use for environmentalists and, indeed, had long believed that Mr. Bush's father lost the 1992 election partly because he was too squishy on environmental issues, offending the conservative base on which Mr. Rove pins his political strategy.
Perhaps Ms. Whitman missed the signs because she wanted so much to believe that she could both help a president she very much admired and contribute to a cause that is important to her. Had she fully understood that, as it now appears, Mr. Rove wanted her on board to help provide cover for the easing of important environmental laws, she might never have taken the job at all.
But take it she did, leading to two and a half years of bureaucratic struggle against the lobbyists and ideologues Mr. Bush had installed in every other important environmental job, as well as a series of brutally embarrassing policy reversals that might have driven a less loyal person out of town much sooner. Of these, the most humiliating was the president's decision to reverse a campaign pledge to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, only weeks after Ms. Whitman, acting on good faith and with Condoleezza Rice's assurances, had promised America's European allies that the pledge would be honored. But there were other setbacks, and they must have stung.
Ms. Whitman's purpose here, however, is not to whine. A product of New Jersey's political aristocracy, and a firm believer in Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment - "thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans" - she is far is too polite to indulge in settling scores. Besides, she has a larger agenda, which is to deplore the hijacking of her beloved Republican Party. After all, this is a woman whose parents met at the 1932 Republican convention, and who attended her first convention when she was only 9.
On this score, she is in full cry, laying about her against the "fundamentalists," the "social conservatives" and the "ideological zealots" whose views on abortion, race and other big social issues she battled tirelessly as governor of New Jersey. This is a call to arms to the remaining moderates of the Eisenhower/Rockefeller school, and a timely reminder in this age of bitter ideological combat that there was once a Republican mainstream, before the mainstream flowed right.
Yet she is maddeningly coy about the reactionaries who determined the Bush administration's environmental policies and ultimately did her in. There is no doubt whatsoever that Vice President Dick Cheney's insistence on unilaterally dismantling the Clean Air Act to please the administration's industrial patrons torpedoed Ms. Whitman's dream of reforming that law in an orderly, bipartisan manner.
She said publicly last week that the weakening of the act had been the insult that finally persuaded her to resign. But in the book she refers only in the most general terms to the "antiregulation element of the base" and to officials who favored "the concerns of business" over the needs of the environment.
In their own way, of course, these shadowy ideologues and their cramped environmental views are as hostile to the Republicanism Ms.Whitman holds dear as the social conservatives. For that reason - even though Mr. Rove and Mr. Cheney make cameo appearances - it seems unfair to leave the reader guessing who the villains really were.
Ms. Whitman gives the president a pass as well. Though she describes Mr. Bush as the "most socially conservative president of my lifetime," she portrays him as a victim of the fundamentalists, not their standard bearer.
And while she is disappointed that Mr. Bush was not more attentive to her views on global warming, and annoyed that he did not fight harder for her reforms of the Clean Air Act, she ultimately excuses him as a prisoner of bad advice and pressures from industry and the right-wingers on Capitol Hill.
But this is absurd. The president was surely complicit in the policies that drove her out of town. One wishes that on this score, Ms. Whitman had abandoned her fealty to the 11th Commandment. That would have better served her party and the historians.
Has GWB learned his lesson about appointing rinos yet?
For sopme reason, I doubt it.
psyche!
LOL, yeah, it is unbeleievable that Whitman apparently thought that Dubya wanted her in his administration in so she could help the socialist scumbags of the Democrat left kill whatever property rights there still are in this country.
I'll skip this one.
What, no barf alert!!!
If Gov. Whitman had been more of a conservationist instead of an environmentalist, it might have worked out better.
Except, Christy Whitman would tell you, the right to an abortion.
She is not riding to their defense, she is slamming them.
The NY Times and liberals feel the slamming is SOP and the "defense" they allude to is Whitman's rhetoric about how the Republicans could be as liberal as the dems.
Somehow to the NY Times that is defending the party.
Christie and the NYT both suck.
"Democrat left kill whatever property rights there still are in this country."
Yep.
I like midwestern common sense......
Denny Crane: "I want two things. First God and then Fox News."
The GOP needs Christie Whitman's political advice like Catherine Zeta Jones needs her beauty tips.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.