PACKET EDITORIAL, May 27
By: Packet Editorial
At some point during her tenure as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, you’ve got to figure Christie Whitman had an epiphany a moment, frozen in time, when all the disappointments, all the broken promises from the White House, all the bad press compelled her to ask herself:
I gave up the governorship of New Jersey for THIS?
Many New Jerseyans wondered from the moment Gov. Whitman announced her decision to walk away from the final year of her term as the state’s chief executive why she was so desperate to join the Bush administration. It wasn’t as if the President-elect had proffered a prestigious ambassadorship or a high-level cabinet position. What he handed her, instead, was one of the most thankless jobs in any administration and an impossible job in an administration with binding ties to the oil industry, a laissez faire attitude toward business in general and an ideological antipathy toward environmental regulation in particular.
But off to Washington went New Jersey’s moderate Republican governor, a poster child for the inclusiveness of the new administration. So certain was she that her own environmental policy positions meshed with those of her new boss that she quickly committed the United States to renewing the Kyoto Protocol on global warming only to have the rug unceremoniously pulled out from under her.
Of course, Ms. Whitman was merely repeating what Texas Gov. Bush had said on the campaign trail. How was she to know this would bear so little resemblance to what President Bush would actually do in the White House? Thus was she introduced to the unpleasant reality that many of the positions she had taken as governor of New Jersey on issues ranging from greenhouse gases to industrial air pollution controls to water quality standards would be far different from those she would be called on to take as EPA administrator.
It must have been especially galling for Ms. Whitman to withdraw regulations that would have forced coal-burning power plants in the Midwest to clean up their act or face EPA penalties. This, after all, is precisely what she and other governors in the Northeast had filed a lawsuit to compel the EPA to do. Yet there she was, as EPA administrator, toeing the Bush administration line, pulling back the regulations, offering protection to the very power plants whose emissions, borne by the prevailing winds, contribute so heavily to air pollution in New Jersey and throughout the Northeast.
While Ms. Whitman insists she had no serious policy disagreements with the president, and says she submitted her resignation only because she wants to return to her New Jersey home, one can’t help but feel she was handed a bill of goods when she accepted the EPA job that turned out to be as phony as an Arthur Andersen audit. We have no doubt she went to Washington with every expectation (and with the president-elect’s assurance) that she would truly protect the environment and, in the process, perhaps make enough of an impression to warrant a loftier position in a second Bush administration. Instead, she found her star falling far outside an orbit of power that drifted much farther to the right than anyone (herself included) could ever have imagined. In the end, she could only try her best to protect a beleaguered agency against a front office with an entirely different agenda.
Years from now, she may look back on the experience and be able to say to herself: I gave up the governorship of New Jersey to save the EPA. For the moment, however, as disappointed as environmentalists have been in the actions this administration has taken over the past 28 months, it has to be doubly frustrating for Ms. Whitman. Maybe, by comparison, spending that final year in Trenton wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.