Will Whitman stick around for the next 100? Friends insist that she is a team player, and that she’s in for the long haul as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. I asked Whitman if she has felt cut adrift at times by the White House. “Not at all,” she told me. “As long as I enjoy the support of the president I don’t feel that way, and we’ve talked.”
Privately, she tells friends that her influence could grow now that President Bush and his advisers clearly have become worried about his somewhat smudged public image on environmental issues. Besides, allies note, if she left now it would be as damaged goods-a crusader fleeing with her a broken lance.
A MOVE TO THE SENATE?
But New Jersey beckons-sort of. Some Republicans there and in the capital would like her to run for the U.S. Senate back home next year. It would be a tough race: Whitman, never an overwhelming force in New Jersey politics, is not nearly as popular as she once was in the state. Then again, the incumbent, Robert Torricelli, is in legal trouble, and the leading Republican who had planned to run for the Senate, Representative Bob Franks, has decided to seek the governorship instead. For Whitman, running against “The Torch” might be more rewarding, and certainly more fun, than being periodically run over in Washington.
I asked Whitman about the rumors that she was considering the idea. “No way,” she said. “I have no interest in it. I can’t foresee any circumstances under which I’d do it.” I know a flat “Shermanesque” statement when I hear one.
That wasn’t one of them.
How Bush handles Whitman-and how she handles herself-are defining questions early in the new administration. Neither Bush nor the EPA administrator can afford to have her seen as ineffectual, or worse. Bush doesn’t have a margin for error. The president has gotten generally high marks from the public and most insiders. The only issue he’s mishandled is the environment, which his handlers concede wasn’t as prominent on their radar screens as it should have been. The environment, to be sure, isn’t the number one issue with voters. (Political guru Karl Rove rates it eighth or ninth on the list, with the economy being number one.) And yet it is the suburbanites in swing districts who care the most. And Bush doesn’t dare ignore them.
ON THE WAY TO THE BIG LEAGUES
When I met Whitman in 1995 she was in her first term as governor, and I remember thinking that this was someone on her way to being a big-league leader. She came for lunch at NEWSWEEK and was impressive: tough, knowledgeable, gracious, confident.
She was also something unusual in the GOP-an ardent defender of abortion rights. She made it clear that she would take on the powers that be in the party, and did. It was one of the items on the check list that cost her any serious consideration as Bush’s running mate.
Whitman’s environmental record in New Jersey wasn’t stellar by activists’ standards, but it was good enough to get her elected twice (narrowly both times) in a state where clean air, water and open spaces are so precious because they are so rare. A product of the horse country, Whitman was a convincing outdoorswoman, and the tourist industry gave her ample reason to be zealous about protecting the state’s beaches.
Even so it wasn’t her environmental record that got her selected for the EPA. More likely it was her stand on abortion, which, while making her unsuited for the vice-presidential slot (a heartbeat away and all that) was useful as a kind of cultural balance wheel in the cabinet.
A ONE-WOMAN BOMB SQUAD
At least that’s the way the announcement of her selection was choreographed. It was the weekend before Christmas, one of the slowest news cycles of the year. The Bush transition team chose that Friday to drop its bombshell: the selection of John Aschcroft for Attorney General, a pick sure to enrage liberals on every count, especially abortion. Whitman’s selection was announced the same day, so that the news would wind up in the same stories. She was a one-woman bomb squad on abortion.
Whitman is in a tough position at the EPA. The business community, for the most part, loathes the mere mention of her agency. The EPA operates in large measure by lawsuits, by the arduous interpretation of laws and regulations that take years to draft. The Bush administration, by its very nature, distrusts that kind of lawyering and those kinds of lawyers. Bush comes from the wildcatting, heartland of Texas-the Midland oil patch-where the reigning ethic is: Get It Out of the Ground, and worry about the consequences later.
Plus, Bush has a genuine energy crisis on his hands. It’s not just a trumped-up thing to benefit Big This or That. We need conservation and new environmentally friendly technology, but there’s little doubt that we have to burn more coal, extract more natural gas and refine more gasoline-all of which bumps up against the laws the EPA enforces.
Whitman and the EPA have won a number of battles recently on nonenergy pollution issues, including enforcement of tough new standards on toxic chemicals, reporting requirements on lead and protection of wetlands. Whitman has become a fixture in the Rose Garden, standing dutifully by the president’s side as he trumpets a green note.
HOW MUCH OF A VOICE?
But it’s not clear how much of a voice Whitman has had in the formulation of the administration’s new energy plan, due to be released next month. At the outset, the answer is: not much.
As a result, she was embarrassed early in the term on the issue of carbon dioxide, the leading “greenhouse gas.” At a meeting of environmental ministers in Trieste, Italy, she declared that the new administration was foursquare in favor of setting rules to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in American power and industrial plants. It was, after all, a campaign promise by Bush. And sources tell me that she had checked with the relevant officials at State and the National Security Council before leaving for the Italy trip. “I talked with the White House before I went,” she told me.
She probably should have checked directly with Cheney and Bush. Without telling her, they had already begun the early stages of a review of the new energy policy-and were on their way to concluding that Bush had to reverse his stand on CO2.
Whitman got to make her case when she got back from Trieste, but it was too late. She ended up on the wrong side, which is acceptable in Washington. But she also looked “out of the loop,” which is not. Washington players don’t mind if they lose, so long as they aren’t revealed not to be players.
OUT-OF-THE-LOOP MOMENT
Last weekend produced another out-of-the-loop moment. Whitman said, in a TV interview, that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was no longer a vital option for the administration. Wrong. First the White House press spokesman, and then the president himself corrected her in a series of interviews about his first 100 days. There would, indeed, be new drilling in the ANWR. What happened?
Whitman was “blindsided” by a question that contained wrong information about the president’s views and that of aide Karl Rove. “It’s a bad rap,” Bush counselor Karen Hughes told me. “Whitman was blindsided by an inaccurate quote about an inaccurate story.”
Whitman says she’s attended every meeting of the energy task force except for the first one. Unfortunately for her, that might have been the one that took place while she was in Trieste. I asked her if there was anything in the report-which is likely to call for a massive new program of exploration and production-to which she objected. “We’re still discussing things,” she said. I would translate that as a “yes.”
It’ll be interesting to see if Whitman is on board when the report is issued-and if she sticks around the Bush administration to help implement it in the years ahead.
