BY KAREN TUMULTY/WASHINGTON
The anonymous letter written on State Department stationery spilled
out of fax
machines in five Republican Senate offices on Feb. 15. Stamped URGENT,
it suggested
that nothing short of an enemy plot was brewing inside the Executive
Branch. Clinton
holdovers, it warned, were "seeking to box the Bush Administration
into a corner
where it will have to choose between a bad deal and international embarrassment.
Please do not let this happen." The Senators took the threat seriously.
Nebraska's
Chuck Hagel fired a memo to Deputy Secretary of State-designate Richard
Armitage:
"We need to get control of this."
Get control they did. Last week, when four of those Senators received
another letter on
the subject, it was signed by George W. Bush, who assured them that
he had quashed
the plot. But the plan he killed--a proposal to slow the pace of global
warming by
limiting the amount of carbon dioxide that electrical utilities release
into the
atmosphere--was no rogue operation by an underground cell of Al Gore
sympathizers.
It was a campaign promise made last fall by Bush, one designed to persuade
environmentally conscious swing voters that he was greener than Gore.
Industry hadn't taken that pledge seriously. But last month similar
language made it
into the President's budget proposal--and more was rumored to be in
his big speech to
Congress, at least until lobbyists made sure it wouldn't happen. EPA
Administrator
Christine Todd Whitman touted the carbon-dioxide limits on CNN and
assured other
countries that Bush was serious about them. Behind the scenes, Treasury
Secretary
Paul O'Neill argued for an even bigger push, telling Bush in a Feb.
27 memo that the
main problem with the as-yet-unratified global-warming treaty was that
it didn't go
far enough. While O'Neill stopped short of endorsing a cap on carbon-dioxide
emissions,
Bush aides were worried about green creep.
And so opponents of emissions controls--including business associations
and industries
that contributed millions to Bush's presidential race--decided late
last month that the
time had come to reverse the trend. Their campaign, which culminated
in Bush's
turnabout letter to Hagel and the others, had all the finesse of a
smackdown, leaving
O'Neill embarrassed and Whitman downright humiliated. Bush consoled
her with an
invitation to Camp David last weekend, shortly after she issued a wan
statement
declaring her own about-face on the issue. But European leaders who
had accepted her
assurances were furious, sources tell TIME. British Ambassador Christopher
Meyer
complained to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby.
And Swedish Prime
Minister Goeran Persson, in a call with Bush on Friday, wanted to know
whether he
was going to take global warming seriously.
Bush's first reversal of a campaign promise served as a reminder: for
all the energy he
has put into convincing the country that he is a compassionate Republican--one
who
cares deeply that poor children learn to read and that their waitress
moms keep a few
extra dollars out of their paychecks--he is also a classic old-school
Republican with an
unwaveringly pro-business, antilabor agenda. In the past two weeks,
Bush and the
G.O.P. Congress have delivered a basket of gifts to business, including
a bill striking
down workplace-safety regulations, another making it harder for people
to declare
bankruptcy and wipe out debts, a court action to open wilderness areas
to road
building and a move to prevent the mechanics union from striking against
Northwest
Airlines. No longer are lobbyists being told "Later, later, it's coming,"
says Republican
John Boehner, chairman of the House committee that oversees labor-management
issues. "We've seen more decisiveness out of Bush in the past 55 days
than we've seen
out of any President for 15 years."
It took an industry outcry and an ordered Administration review, however,
to produce
Bush's startling turnaround on carbon-dioxide emissions. The interagency
group that
met at the White House two weeks ago was deeply divided. Whitman's
EPA wanted to
stand by the campaign promise. The State and Treasury departments wanted
to
finesse the issue by deferring action. And political director Ken Mehlman
wanted to
abandon the promise, calling it a liability in states like coal-rich
West Virginia, which
Bush won last year after decades of Democratic dominance. All three
options were
presented to Bush.
Critics howled that Bush's reversal was a payoff to industries that
had contributed at
least $4.5 million to his campaign--an accusation that would have been
easier to
deflect had the White House been able to keep its story straight. But
first it claimed the
campaign had simply made "a mistake" when it included carbon dioxide
as a pollutant
in Bush's September speech. That didn't square with other recollections.
"The
argument that this was just a couple of words in a speech couldn't
be farther from the
truth," says Fred Krupp, who heads Environmental Defense and in a series
of
campaign discussions helped convince Bush of the dangers of greenhouse
gases. Nor
did that initial explanation square with Bush's letter, which cited
changes in the
energy market as the reason for his reversal.
Shaky though his rationale may be, the question of whether to act now
on global
warming may go down as the most important long-term decision Bush makes.
While
melting glaciers on faraway mountains may seem like a remote problem
to most
Americans, the vast majority of climatologists are convinced that global
warming is a
real problem that could have catastrophic consequences by the end of
the century.
Over the past three months, hundreds of scientists working under the
U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned that the earth
is not only
warming but also warming faster than they predicted just six years
ago. And the
evidence suggests that carbon dioxide belched by coal-fired plants--which
generate
more than half of U.S. power--is a prime culprit. But Bush was moved
by more
immediate concerns. Converting coal plants to other fuels could cost
more than $100
billion and boost the cost of electricity nearly 50%, according to
the Energy
Department study he relied on in making his decision. (Environmentalists
say the
figures are vastly inflated.)
That Bush would side with business should be no surprise to anyone familiar
with his
record in Texas, and it is a tribute to his political skills that he
made it two months into
his presidency before his moderate rhetoric collided with his conservative
instincts.
On social issues, such collisions are inevitable. Last week, as the
New York Times
reported, Bush planned to ask the American Bar Association to drop
its review of
judicial nominees, long a sore spot for conservatives. But where business
is concerned,
Bush has often let Congress take the lead--and the heat. After banks,
retailers and
credit-card companies poured millions of dollars into both parties
during the last
election, the bill tightening the rules for consumer bankruptcy sailed
through the
Senate last week. And a week earlier, with an assurance that Bush would
back them,
House and Senate Republicans rolled back regulations protecting 102
million people
from injuries caused by repetitive work in factories and at computer
keyboards.
Businesses argued that the regulations were too burdensome and expensive,
although
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimated that they
would
actually save $9.1 billion a year when the cost of wages and productivity
lost to
injuries was factored in. Bush didn't call a single lawmaker to lobby
for the repeal, but
House majority whip Tom DeLay thanked him anyway, attributing the victory
to
"the very fact that he was in the White House."
Most of the moves Bush has made against labor haven't attracted much
attention. One
of his first acts in office was to freeze restrictions that prevented
the Federal
Government from doing business with companies that have a record of
violating labor
laws. And on a Saturday in February--only three days after Labor Secretary
Elaine
Chao held a conciliatory meeting with the AFL-CIO executive council
in Los
Angeles--Bush issued four antiunion Executive Orders: two weakened
labor's hand
with federal contractors; another aimed to cut into its political power
by reducing the
amount it collects for political activities. "Put it together, and
it's probably as
antiunion a package as we've seen from anybody in the past 50 years,"
charges
AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal, who clearly knows how to
turn a phrase
into a battle cry. "George Bush makes Ronald Reagan look like Mother
Jones."
Union officials say Bush's long-standing sympathy for business is not
the only reason
behind his aggressive stance. It's payback, they say, for their effectiveness
in turning
out union voters against Bush last fall. Exit-poll data support their
claim that voters
in union households provided the margin of victory for Gore in such
battleground
states as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. The United Auto Workers
even
negotiated a day off on Election Day, during which the union put 2,000
members to
work getting out the vote for Gore.
In a conference call with state labor leaders last week, AFL-CIO president
John
Sweeney declared that unions should once again consider themselves
on a war footing.
Says Rosenthal: "We're going to start carrying that message into workplaces
and make
sure people are fully aware of it." Which is bound to make Republicans
in moderate
districts across the Midwest and Northeast nervous. Last week 33 House
Republicans
wrote Bush to protest one of his four Executive Orders. And bigger
battles loom. The
President said last week that he will sign campaign-finance legislation
only if it
requires unions to get permission from workers before using their dues
for political
purposes. Bush proposes to allow states to opt out of minimum-wage
increases. And
unions don't expect to see any friends among the three replacements
Bush will make to
the National Labor Relations Board this year.
Unions are also planning a major effort to defeat Florida Governor Jeb
Bush in his
re-election bid next year. More than election grudges are at stake.
After negotiations
between Jeb and the public-employees union bogged down, the Governor
went to the
legislature to get some of his demands written into law. "We've got
a responsibility,"
says Gerald McEntee, the union's national president. "How can we stand
on the
sidelines when the workers are being attacked by the Governor of the
state?"
But the sidelines are where labor will find itself as long as Bush is
in the White House
and Republicans control both houses of Congress. The biggest question
now is whether
a weakening economy will make it more difficult for the President to
satisfy the
demands of his corporate backers while meeting the concerns of Americans
worried
about losing jobs, benefits and economic security. It was probably
a bad omen that the
Senate voted to toughen the bankruptcy laws last week just as the market
headed into
bear territory, raising the possibility that more people will be learning
about those
laws firsthand. Business is all about separating the winners from the
losers, but in
politics, the losers as well as the winners get to vote.
"From W. With Love" was published in Vol. 157 No. 12 of
Time Magazine dated March 26th, 2001