The key word is “consistent.” Bob Dole is consistent. His campaign consistently misuses — or just plain throws away — its best weapons against President Clinton.
At the Detroit Economic Club on September 24, Dole’s men provided him with a speech identifying Clinton as a grimly determined “old-style, dyed-in-the- wool, big-spending liberal committed to a government that spends and spends and taxes and taxes.” We’ll discount for the permissible exaggerations of American electioneering and grant the ballpark accuracy of the “liberal” charge. The speech may have been pushing it a bit rhetorically, but it wasn’t exactly wrong.
But the flip side of Dole’s argument was exactly wrong. Our liberal, liberal, liberal president, Dole bravely insisted, defying a view widely held even among Clinton’s admirers, is not “a finger-in-the-wind politician.” Instead, he is a man of principle. People who “say that Bill Clinton will take any position, say anything as a matter of political convenience” — those people are wrong. The president, Dole announced, is consistent.
And the president is pleased to agree. The day before Dole spoke in Detroit, Clinton sat for a long PBS interview with the always polite and straight- faced Jim Lehrer. Lehrer pressed him repeatedly on the “finger-in-the-wind” issue. People complain that you float with public opinion rather than challenge it, Lehrer suggested. Most voters believe that you speak and act as you do for reasons of election, not conviction. Few voters believe you are honest or constant.
That is “total nonsense,” the president replied. There is not “a single, solitary shred of evidence of anything dishonest that I have done in my public life.” Hundreds of distinct evidentiary shreds run instantly through one’s mind, of course. But wait: It gets better. “If you look at what I’ve done as president,” Clinton explained, “it’s remarkably consistent with what I did as governor and very consistent with what I said I would do” in 1992. And “I don’t mind being unpopular or controversial.” And “I have tried to be very consistent.”
What an unscrupulous liar he is. And it is much the worst thing about him, too — not the implacable (and, therefore, in some sense honorable) leftism that Bob Dole’s speechwriters have tried to conjure up. We now have a president who is so bottomlessly cynical in word and deed that he has rendered almost quaint the idea of political integrity in the White House. The country’s resistance to presidential flim-flammery appears nearly exhausted. Each new outrage is reported with ever more supine resignation and indifference by the press.
Such as this one: The week before he asserted his unimpeachable truthfulness on PBS, Bill Clinton abruptly announced a (literally) enormous policy decision simply and solely to create a good campaign photo-op. By executive fiat, he created the largest national monument in the continental United States, roughly the size of Delaware. It is the “Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument,” a place laden, the president proclaimed, with an abundance of (get out your National Geographics) packrat middens and the fossils of Cretaceous brackish water mollusks. It is a place that offers ” an extraordinary opportunity to study plant speciation and community dynamics independent of climatic variables.” A place, indeed, “where distance and aridity have been pitted against our dreams and courage.”
Actually, it is a place so flat, desolate, and deathlike that they filmed the Planet of the Apes movies there a quarter-century ago. And it is a place — 1.7 million acres of south-central Utah that has been the subject of a battle between environmentalists and Utah residents and officials concerned with free land use and economic development for almost 20 years. The federal Bureau of Land Management began studying the area’s potential wilderness designation, the government’s most restrictive land-use status, in 1978. The bureau initially identified slightly more than 3 million acres of Utah that appeared to meet wilderness criteria. A final 1991 report to Congress recommended formal wilderness designation for about 2 million acres.
But Congress has taken no action since. So the Bureau of Land Management, following Clinton administration policy, has been managing Utah’s disputed land — all of it and more, 5.7 million acres total — as if it were an official wilderness. And in the absence of legislation to the contrary, that’s the way this territory will stay: protected as much as landmanagement law allows. Why, then, President Clinton’s urgency to “rescue” the area on September 18, six weeks before a national election? Could politics have something to do with it?
Not at all, insists the president. There is a proposed coal mine in the area, his people say. Yes, there is. About 20 miles north of Big Water, Utah, a company called Andalex Resources holds federal mining rights to a portion of America’s largest untapped energy reserve. There are 62 billion tons of coal down there, low-sulfur, low-ash, low-moisture, hot-burning coal — precisely the kind of “clean coal” alternative Bill Clinton pounded George Bush for ignoring in 1992. About 15 percent of this coal is recoverable, and that’s enough coal to power the entire state of Utah for a millennium. The Utah Geological Survey reports that the net present value of just that coal that sits under acreage set aside in trust for the state’s school system is between $ 640 million and $ 1.1 billion.
The “environmental impact statement” process by which the federal government might grant its final approval for the Andalex mine is now six years old. A final draft from the Bureau of Land Management was due early next year. So were we about to strip-mine paradise? Against the chance that rapacious naturehater Bob Dole might be president, did Bill Clinton need so quickly to invoke his authority as preservationist in chief?
No. The Andalex mine is not in paradise. Standing on the Planet of the Apes landscape, you cannot even see it. The site is at the bottom of a deep, circular canyon. It would occupy all of 40 surface acres of the president’s new 1.7-million-acre monument, and would otherwise be undetectable but for truck traffic on a single road. And those 40 acres have never qualified for wilderness designation. In fact, they were long ago explicitly considered for the honor by the Bureau of Land Management — and were rejected.
Never mind. It is the plain idea of a coal mine that environmentalists despise. And that’s enough for this White House, well aware of the public- opinion-poll power of any “Earth-friendly” initiative. So off the president went to sign his proclamation. He went to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is in Arizona. But it looks better than south-central Utah on color TV. Robert Redford was there. A naturalist named Terry Tempest Williams warmed up the crowd. “These lands are alive,” she said. “This action fully restores our souls. Listen. This silence.” At which point, according to the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach, a helicopter roared overhead to announce Bill Clinton’s arrival.
No significant elected official from Utah attended the ceremony. The night before it took place, the White House was still telling those officials that no decision had been made about their land. Even Rep. Bill Orton, Utah’s lone Democratic congressman, in whose economically disadvantaged district the mine is located, was kept in the dark. The New York Times was better informed. The morning of Clinton’s Grand Canyon spectacle, the Times ran a tidy little editorial praising the move, parroting the administration’s defense of it and trashing the Andalex mine. Tom Robinson, conservation director of the Grand Canyon Trust, later informed the Salt Lake Tribune that he’d been told the new monument had tested well in Clinton-Gore campaign polls. No other American newspaper has followed this interesting lead.
So. Is the coal mine dead? The president implied as much in his Grand Canyon remarks. The question was left to interior secretary Bruce Babbitt for amplification. “I think what [Clinton] said about the mine is quite clear,” Babbitt mumbled. “He says mining is appropriate in some places, inappropriate in others.” But is the coal mine dead — yes, no, or maybe? “All of the above, ” replied the secretary. So in fact mining is not ruled out by the president’s action.
Yes, President Clinton is remarkably consistent in his craven inconsistency. When the presidential debates get underway, it would be nice if Bob Dole said so. Bill Clinton may or may not be a dyed-in-thewool liberal. But God almighty, is he dishonest. It’s the veracity, stupid.
David Tell, for the Editors
