WP: It's Her Party and She'll Cry If She Wants To (C. T. Whitman) [View All]

Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor who was President Bush's first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is violating the omerta of Bush alumni with a memoir that touts the importance of moderates to the future of the Republican Party and flays Bush and his team for ignoring the country's middle. Whitman charges on Page 3 that Bush's three-percentage-point margin in the popular vote is the lowest of any incumbent president ever to win reelection.

"The numbers show that while the president certainly did energize his political base, the red state/blue state map changed barely at all -- suggesting that he had missed an opportunity to significantly broaden his support in the most populous areas of the country," Whitman writes. "The Karl Rove strategy to focus so rigorously on the narrow conservative base won the day, but we must ask at what price to governing and at what risk to the future of the party."

Whitman was a bit of a misfit in the Bush Cabinet, coming in as a supporter of abortion rights and taking a job that is not a quick route to popularity in a GOP administration. She left in June 2003, clearly unhappy.

The book gives a flavor of how different the White House mind-set was before Sept. 11, 2001. Whitman writes that after meeting with the president-elect at a hotel suite in Washington, she had no doubt that Bush "wanted a strong environmental record to be part of both his agenda and his legacy."

"The belief was reinforced when Karl Rove told me after that meeting that I would be one of just three cabinet officers who would help determine whether the president would be reelected," she writes. "I took Rove to mean that the work I would do in building a strong record on the environment would help the president build on his base by attracting moderate swing voters. As it turned out, I don't seem to have understood Karl correctly." Whitman does not say exactly what she meant, but she goes on to write about her many scars and frustrations in dealing with what she calls the "antiregulatory lobbyists and extreme antigovernment ideologues" that she suggests hold too much sway over the party.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41511-2005Jan1.html