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He's no Teddy Roosevelt, but he's not Gary Bauer either
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Feb. 12, 2000 | McCain likes to recall the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt when discussing the environment, much the way he calls the GOP the party of Abraham Lincoln when addressing race. But his record is too mixed to place him in Roosevelt's class. When it comes to green issues, he's generally perceived as good for Arizona and the national park system, but bad for the rest of the country. After polls showed that the GOP suffered in the 1996 elections as a result of the fact that 55 percent of Republicans didn't trust their party on environmental issues, McCain publicly attempted to soften the party's anti-green reputation. In a New York Times environmental call to arms, McCain wrote: "We need to assure the public that in the 105th Congress the Republican environmental agenda will consist of more than coining new epithets for environmental extremists or offering banal symbolic gestures."
Despite McCain's newfound environmental fervor, and a decent track record on land conservation issues (Grand Canyon Executive Trust director Ed Norton once called him "the Grand Canyon's best friend" for his work on behalf of the park), he still consistently has scored low on annual League of Conservation Voters environmental legislation score cards. During the 15 years LCV has tracked McCain, he has racked up a lifetime score of 20 out of 100. And last year, while he was arguing his maverick case for the presidency to the American public, he missed what LCV describes as five critical environmental votes on oil, wildlife, fuel efficiency and mining. His score card for 1999 was a dismal 11 percent. Even more discouraging, when asked by Dartmouth environmental studies students about his environmental policy plans, he said he would "get more smart people working on the issue." Not exactly confidence-inspiring for a man who fancies himself heir to Roosevelt's legacy. McCain's other environmental missteps have been widely reported. He publicly opposed a December Clinton administration order banning new road construction in 50 million acres of national forest in the Southwest. The decision was best decided by locals, McCain said, before launching into one of his characteristic tirades against Beltway hubris: "The idea that Washington knows best and that local residents cannot be trusted to do what's right in their own backyard is the epitome of federal arrogance." If elected, McCain has said he would repeal the road moratorium, along with President Clinton's 1996 decision to create the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. He has also failed to act on a measure before Congress that would close a loophole allowing foreign ships to sail into U.S. waters without adherence to U.S. regulations. Oregon Democrats Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Peter DeFazio drafted the bill after last year's New Carissa disaster, where a foreign-flagged ship ran ashore at Coos Bay, Ore., and dumped 70,000 gallons of oil, and a similar scandal involving massive and deliberate oil dumpings by Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. in areas surrounding U.S. coastal waters. The bill has sat untouched since March because McCain, who heads the oversight committee responsible for it, has been out on the campaign trail. Arizonans have been most critical of the controversial telescope project McCain spearheaded in his home state. In 1989, he pushed through legislation to build giant telescopes for the University of Arizona on Mount Graham near Tucson, the habitat of a red squirrel threatened with extinction. The move was opposed by environmentalists because, they believed, it represented an unprecedented circumvention of the Endangered Species Act. The incident also showed the elephant-in-the-china-closet side of McCain -- an issue his fellow GOP candidates have raised to question his fitness for the presidency. A General Accounting Office report following an investigation of the project accused McCain of threatening to have a U.S. Forest Service supervisor fired for halting construction of a road into the Mount Graham area during an administrative appeal of the observatory construction decision. According to the GAO, McCain told James Abbot that if "he did not cooperate on this project he would be the shortest tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service."
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