EDITORIAL: The former governor’s resignation is an indication of the Bush administration’s disregard for the environment.
Christie Whitman must have had an epiphany.
After two-plus years at the helm of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the former New Jersey governor must have come to the realization that she could no longer peddle the Bush administration’s hardcore anti-green line.
Many New Jerseyans wondered from the moment she announced her decision to walk away from the final year as governor 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 bound so tightly to the oil industry and the corporate world and possessing an ideological antipathy toward environmental regulation in particular.
Her problems began almost immediately. Within months of taking office, Ms. Whitman 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, she was only taking her lead from what the new president had promised 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 on issues ranging from greenhouse gases to industrial air pollution controls to water quality standards would differ from those she would be called on to take in Washington.
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 Bush mouthpiece, offering protection to the very power plants whose emissions contribute so heavily to air pollution here.
Ms. Whitman insists she had no serious policy disagreements with the president and that she resigned because she wants to return to New Jersey. But one has to guess that being marginalized in such an anti-green administration finally wore her down. No one would ever mistake Gov. Whtiman for a tree-hugging environmentalist in her tenure in New Jersey, but her basic environmental beliefs ended up being so out of step with the anti-green Bush White House that with every public statement one could almost see her nose grow.
She may have gone 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.
So Ms. Whitman shouldn’t be judged too harshly for stepping aside. It’s not as if her presence in Washington made much of a difference anyway.

