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chapter 8 George H. W. Bush After serving two terms as vice president, George H. W. Bush1 vigorously campaigned in 1988 as the Republican Party nominee who intended to carry forward the Reagan agenda. However, he chose a different course regarding the environment. Bush 41 made a concerted effort to distance himself from Reagan’s environmental policies, since President Reagan had earned a reputation for being the only modern “anti-environmental” president . Bush 41, on the other hand, indicated during the 1988 campaign that he wished to be a “Republican president in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition. A conservationist. An environmentalist.”2 He added, “I am an environmentalist ; always have been and always will be.”3 It was John Greer who suggested that Bush 41, in taking this position, attempted to “co-opt classic Democratic issues by telling voters that he would be the ‘education’ and ‘environmental’ president.”4 In fact, eight months after assuming the presidency, his administration produced a “White House Fact Sheet on Environmental Initiatives” that was a comprehensive description of environmental actions that both the president and Congress had engaged in or would in the future initiate.5 It is important to provide a portrait of George H. W. Bush who, as a traditional conservative, found himself caught between a dedication to conservation and an allegiance to the Republican base of his party. As we will see in the following discussion, the first half of his term as president reflected concern with conservation and environmental politics highlighted by his support of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, while the second half of his presidency reflected a reversal in his commitment to environmentalism demonstrated by his negative actions at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. George H. W. Bush’s approach to the presidency reflected, in the words of Burt Solomon, filling “his administration with practical men and women who are generally conservative but not obsessively so, who tend to be—as he is—civil,cautiousandconciliatory.”6 AsNelsonPolsbycharacterizedBush41, here was a president who was a “genuine conservative” who cared “about society and the government that is handed to them.”7 Or, as Erwin Hargrove 156 chapter eight described him, Bush was a “centrist Republican who desires to manage government well after Ronald Reagan’s anti-government and anti-communist activism.”8 During his four years in office, Bush 41, the centrist, walked a line between personal commitment and party loyalty. Here was a president who defined his campaign for president in 1988 as part of the environmental tradition of Teddy Roosevelt yet during his reelection campaign in 1992 he referred to Democratic vice presidential candidate Al Gore as “ozone man,” reflecting an “antiregulatory tenor [that] sounded increasingly like that of Ronald Reagan in 1980.”9 As we will see later in this chapter, Bush 41 found himself affected by the countervailing pressures he set in motion. For instance, through his appointments , he satisfied environmentalists by nominating William Reilly, former head of the World Wildlife Fund, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, while at the same time appointing former New Hampshire governor John Sununu as secretary of the interior, a man at odds with the environmental movement. Ultimately, Bush 41’s administration was “beset by internal divisions represented by individuals who themselves were not environmentally friendly, and who in the end controlled the legislative agenda.”10 In short, as Walter Rosenbaum described the president’s dilemma, “President George H. W. Bush awakened expectations of major reform from the environmental movement and brought to the White House a more sympathetic and active environmentalism. . . . Nonetheless, the backslide of Bush environmentalism was equally conspicuous” as his administration increasingly represented a “low priority for environmentalism on the policy agenda.”11 President Bush was challenged by multiple obstacles regarding his environmental agenda. As Robert Shanley explained Bush’s dilemma, the president “inherited an enormous deficit problem, a savings and loan bailout and a nuclear weapons plan cleanup estimated to cost billions of dollars, other neglected environmental problems, and a polarization between Congress and the White House.”12 Consequently, he needed to engage in successful coalition-building by forging an alliance between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and thereby gain bipartisan support for his primary environmental commitment, which came about in his campaign as the effort to pass the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. However, Bush’s appointment of Manuel Lujan Jr. as interior secretary raised concerns among those in the environmentalcommunityovertheroleofthefederalandstategovernments...

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