LITMIR.BIZ

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first for a change” and his sacrifice of the people of East Liverpool to benefit garbage interests.

      

      The bus tour began in April 1993 and traveled across the nation to twenty-five communities with hazardous waste incinerators. It won publicity for the East Liverpool campaign in local papers wherever it went. The tour arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 1993, and more than two hundred people protested in front of the White House, chanting for Al Gore to “read his book” and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Seventy-five people were arrested, including actor Martin Sheen and Greenpeace executive director Barbara Dudley. The Washington Post noted that the demonstrators seemed to be Clinton voters who never expected to march against him; one East Liverpool mother of three said of Clinton, “We have got to make him more afraid of us.” Terri Swearingen observed, “Clinton talks about change and about giving us an environmental presidency. And so far, where is the change? There is no difference between Clinton and Bush.”⁸

      Regrettably, other national groups and grassroots activists throughout the country failed to mobilize around this litmus-test issue. As Greenpeace’s Hind put it in April 1993, “The dirty secret is that we have been soft-pedaling this administration because we hoped that they would live up to their commitment. But it’s clear that they are either totally incompetent or are on the other side.”⁹

      Predictably, the failure of national organizations to attack Clinton-Gore over the issuance of a permanent permit for the WTI incinerator wreaked further damage to the environmental cause. After twelve years of anti-environment Republican presidents, the first two years of the Democratic Clinton administration brought only one significant piece of national environmental legislation. This measure, the California Desert Protection Act, was passed at the last minute of the 1994 congressional session solely to assist California Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein in her tough reelection battle. Even worse, national environmental issues receded to the deep background of the public agenda; public opinion polls in 1994 regularly found that fewer than 5 percent of Americans viewed such issues as among the country’s most pressing problems.¹⁰

      Strengthening the Clean Air Act

      Some national environmental groups learned from Clinton’s first term that this was a president and an administration that responded only to the fear-and-loathing approach. Al Gore had declared in his popular book Earth in the Balance, “The people in a democratic society need to be prepared to hold their elected Officials accountable.” Yet national groups in the East Liverpool struggle passed up the opportunity to target Gore, who should have been held accountable for his broken promise on the WTI facility and for the Clinton administration’s entire record of environmental failure.

      In 1997, environmental groups got a chance to revisit this issue. On November 27, 1996, EPA chief Browner announced long-awaited new standards for protecting the public from breathing smog and soot. Supposed to have been issued within five years after amendments were made to the Clean Air Act in 1990, these standards were finally released after the American Lung Association sued the EPA and the court ordered the agency to act. Browner’s proposed standards were far stricter than anticipated, and her announcement set in motion a public hearing process that would culminate in President Clinton’s decision to accept, reject, or modify the new standards.

      In other words, the future of the Clean Air Act regulations would be decided through the political process. And rather than trusting Bill Clinton and Al Gore to do the right thing, national groups led by the Sierra Club and the national network of state and local Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) built a national campaign to pressure the Clinton administration to do the right thing. In contrast to the WTI struggle, this battle made Al Gore a public target. Gore had long claimed to be an environmentalist (this was a decade before he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change), and his personal relationships with environmental leaders had protected the Clinton administration from attacks despite repeated betrayals during much of its first term. The willingness of national environmental leaders to sacrifice green interests in exchange for continuing invitations to the monthly Al Gore power breakfast symbolized the inside-the-Beltway approach to national politics that grassroots activists condemned.

      When Gore was silent about the new standards, some suspected that the leading contender for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination feared alienating organized labor and Democratic mayors and governors in the Midwest, who did not want the new clean air regulations adopted. These suspicions were heightened when a May 30, 1997, unbylined news brief in the Wall Street Journal claimed that pressure was mounting on the EPA to “ease proposed antipollutant rules.” Reporting that the White House had “privately ordered EPA head Browner not to sign the tough regulations until weaker measures got another look,” the brief added that “environmental groups complain Browner hasn’t gotten support from Gore, her former boss.” Would environmental groups adopt the fearand-loathing route of grassroots activists and make Gore publicly responsible for the regulations, or would they follow the “Don’t blame Al, he’s our friend” approach that had brought failure in the past?¹¹

      The answer was soon revealed. On June 3, 1997, Kathryn Hohmann, the Sierra Club’s director of environmental quality, launched the organization’s “Where’s Al?” Northeast tour. Speaking from New Hampshire, the site of the first primary for Gore’s expected presidential bid, Hohmann told Reuters News Service: “We’re here to say ‘come out, come out wherever you are.’ Our goal is not to bash someone, but there are some very large shoes he needs to fill in leading environmental causes.” Hohmann’s “Where’s Al?” tour sent a message to the presidential aspirant that his environmental credentials were on the line in the clean air campaign. It also used the Club’s Northeast chapters to build local media pressure on the region’s politicians to formally endorse the new standards.¹²

      The strategy of focusing on Gore soon paid off. The lead story in the Sunday, June 1, issue of the New York Times, “Top EPA Official Not Backing Down on Air Standards,” had the subtitle “Gore’s Voice Could Be Pivotal in Contentious Baffle over Tighter Pollution Rules.” Noting that Gore would play a “major role—probably the decisive one—in deciding whether to back up Ms. Browner,” the article reaffirmed Hohmann’s argument that the clean air outcome would affect “how enthusiastically environmentalists support his presidential effort in 2000.”

      U.S. PIRG’s Gene Karpinski was given the front page of the most widely read edition of the nation’s most influential newspaper to state: “Since this is the top priority issue for the national environmental community at this time, any weakening of public health protection by the White House would certainly be a huge negative for Vice President Gore that would not be forgotten.” A June 5 USA Today story on clean air noted that Gore “has been particularly conspicuous in his low-key role,” and quoted Paul Billings of the American Lung Association, who said that “the silence from the White House has been deafening. There’s a Gore watch out. We can’t find Al.”¹³

      The pressure on Gore intensified. On Sunday, June 22, a front-page, unbylined story in the New York Times, “Environmental Groups Say Gore Has Not Measured Up to the Job,” further explored the issue. “Organizations that have sided with the vice president throughout his public career,” the article stated, “are now using extraordinarily blunt language to warn that ‘green’ voters might abandon him in the Democratic primaries in 2000 unless he delivers now.” Deborah Callahan of the League of Conservation Voters found it “perplexing” that the vice president would “step back from providing the leadership” that she and her colleagues expected. Phillip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust told the Times that “the failure of the White House to provide any leadership on the clean air standards raises real questions about what real environmental progress Vice President Gore can point to in claiming the mantle of the environmental candidate in the year 2000.”

      But the article also noted that complaints about “Al Gore’s silent spring” had begun to bring results. It stated that Gore had recently moved to act “behind the scenes” to ensure that the clean air decision would satisfy environmentalists. Environmental groups’ adoption of the fear-and-loathing approach would soon bring victory.

      “I Think

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