November 8, 2004
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November 8, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Voting Without the Facts
By BOB HERBERT
he so-called values issue, at least as it's being popularly tossed around, is overrated.
Last week's election was extremely close and a modest shift in any number of factors might have changed the outcome. If the weather had been better in Ohio. ...If the wait to get into the voting booth hadn't been so ungodly long in certain Democratic precincts. ... Or maybe if those younger voters had actually voted. ...
I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of
President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.
This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.
The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."
I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.
A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.
If you don't think this values thing has gotten out of control, consider the lead paragraph of an op-ed article that ran in The LA. Times on Friday. It was written by Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who is now a host on the Christian talk-radio station KKLA.
"Christians, in politics as in evangelism," said Mr. Pastore, "are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology."
Mr. Pastore goes on to exhort Christian conservatives to reject any and all voices that might urge them "to compromise with the vanquished." How's that for values?
In The New York Times on Thursday, Richard Viguerie, the dean of conservative direct mail, declared, "Now comes the revolution." He said, "Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party, are urging the president to 'unite' the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years."
Mr. Viguerie, it is clear, will stand four-square against any such dangerous moves toward reconciliation.
You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent. Does it make sense for the progressive elements in our society to undermine their own deeply held beliefs in tolerance, fairness and justice in an effort to embrace those who deliberately seek to divide?
What the Democratic Party needs above all is a clear message and a bold and compelling candidate. The message has to convince Americans that they would be better off following a progressive Democratic vision of the future. The candidate has to be a person of integrity capable of earning the respect and the affection of the American people.
This is doable. Al Gore and
John Kerry were less than sparkling candidates, and both came within a hair of defeating Mr. Bush.
What the Democrats don't need is a candidate who is willing to shape his or her values to fit the pundits' probably incorrect analysis of the last election. Values that pivot on a dime were not really values to begin with.
November 8, 2004
G.O.P. Plans to Give Environment Rules a Free-Market Tilt
By FELICITY BARRINGER and MICHAEL JANOFSKY
ASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - With the elections over, Congress and the Bush administration are moving ahead with ambitious environmental agendas that include revamping signature laws on air pollution and endangered species and reviving a moribund energy bill that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration.
In addition, the administration intends to accelerate conservation efforts by distributing billions of dollars to private landowners for the preservation of wetlands and wildlife habitats. The White House also plans to announce next month a new effort to clean up the Great Lakes.
The groundwork for the push was laid down in the past four years even as environmental groups, Congressional moderates and the courts put the brakes on major changes. But the election returns that gave Mr. Bush a clear victory and expanded the Republicans' majorities in Congress have emboldened those determined to hard-wire free-market principles into all environmental policy.
"The election is a validation of our philosophy and agenda," Michael O. Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview. "We will make more progress in less time while maintaining economic competitiveness for the country. That is my mission."
Representative Joe L. Barton of Texas, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said he was eager to get the process started and encouraged the environmental groups and Democrats who typically oppose Republican initiatives "to come out of the trenches and meet me halfway."
But with industry groups anticipating relaxed regulations and environmental groups fighting to retain stiff regulations, the environmental debate over the next four years could be contentious.
"What you're going to see is an administration focused on setting broad goals and then letting states and companies and individuals work to achieve those, within an economic framework," said Charles Wehland, a lawyer for Jones Day in Chicago who represents clients like the OGE Energy Corporation and the Great Lakes Chemical Corporation. But Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a nonprofit group, warned the White House and Congressional leadership that it would be risky to further push the agenda of the last four years.
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George Bush doesn't have to run again, but Republican lawmakers do," Mr. Clapp said. "They know there is a cost to their political association with rolling back environmental laws."
Nationally, the environment was a sleeper issue that never awoke. But concern for environmental and conservation issues was sometimes visible at the local level. Montana voters, for instance, rejected an initiative to overturn a ban on a form of mining cyanide, effectively blocking a large new mine on the Blackfoot River.
Bush administration officials say that among the first measures moving toward enactment will be those that govern air pollution levels. The administration initiative known as Clear Skies, which generated lukewarm support in Congress during Mr. Bush's first term, is about to come out of mothballs. Will Hart, a spokesman for Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, said it was Mr. Imhofe's "No. 1 environmental issue."
Clear Skies establishes lower emission standards for pollutants like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, but environmental groups complain that it does not reduce them as much or as soon as levels set forth in a competing bill or by enforcement of the Clean Air Act.
Senator James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is the ranking minority member of the committee and a co-sponsor of the competing bill, said it saddened him that Mr. Bush was leading efforts to undermine air standards that his father, the first President Bush, supported. Citing the new alignment in the Senate - 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and himself - Mr. Jeffords said, "We have the power to block any measure detrimental to the environment."
But even if a Clear Skies bill fades again, Mr. Leavitt said he intended to enact its regulatory equivalent, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, a "cap-and-trade" approach to lowering emissions that would set pollution levels for 29 Eastern states and the District of Columbia, by the end of the year. Such approaches allow companies flexibility on how to meet standards, including trading pollution credits.
For now, the Bush administration has no intention of regulating the heat-trapping gases, like carbon dioxide, which scientists believe contribute to global warming.
A top priority of powerful Congressional Republicans is the 31-year-old Endangered Species Act. Representative Richard W. Pombo of California, chairman of the Committee on Resources, has made efforts to raise the hurdles that scientists must clear to ensure a government determination that a species is endangered and cut back the amount of critical habitat required. Habitat designations pave the way for land use controls.
"We will put these back together and really start trying to figure out how we can put together a bipartisan compromise," Mr. Pombo said in a recent interview.
On issues like ranching, hydropower and logging, he said, humans are competing with other species in the same territory. "It's unrealistic to say that humans are not part of the environment and are not going to have an impact," he said. "We need to say, 'These two trains are on the same track; how do we get them not to crash?' "
The energy bill will pass, he said, adding that any bill produced in the House would open 2,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for energy exploration.
A third priority, Mr. Pombo said, is a package of legislation dealing with ocean resources, including issues like the controls appropriate for commercial and sport fisheries, the protection of endangered marine mammals and the mandate of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
Dana Perino, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview on Friday that the administration, like Mr. Pombo, put a high priority on the energy bill and the oceans issue. Ms. Perino also said the administration was eager to disburse the unspent portion of the $40 billion appropriated by Congress for conservation initiatives undertaken by farmers and private landowners.
Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, through her spokeswoman, Tina Kreisher, declined to be interviewed about her agency's top priorities until Mr. Bush decided who would serve in his new cabinet.
Several pending actions to open up wild areas of the West to energy development could be made final in the coming weeks, touching on areas like Roan Plateau in Colorado and Otero Mesa in New Mexico.
David Alberswerth, an expert on public lands issues with the Wilderness Society, agreed that the Republican gains in Congress had increased the difficulty of blocking a law opening the Alaska refuge, but he cautioned that some Bush voters already opposed energy development projects in their regions.
"When the Bush administration came into office four years ago, you didn't have ranchers and farmers and hunters and anglers upset about their energy agenda," Mr. Alberswerth said. "The administration will continue to pursue the same policies they have pursued, and I'm confident that if they do, they will encounter opposition from that quarter."
Jim Range, the chairman of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of hunting and fishing groups whose members include some staunch conservatives who are also conservationists, said energy development would be "an issue that hits the ground running."
Mr. Range's group is split over the Alaska issue and would probably sit out that debate, he said. "But in regard to other energy development, particularly on federal lands," he said, "there's a consensus that we ought to do energy development but we ought to do it right."
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