Bush Seizes Initiative : Environmentalists Find Dukakis’ Silence Vexing

It was a nightmarish summer, environmentally speaking, and it seemed designed to push pollution issues to the forefront of the presidential campaign.

In the Midwest, farmers baked under a drought and wondered if their shriveled crops were the victim of the greenhouse effect. Evidence mounted that the ozone layer was crumbling, probably leading to higher skin cancer rates. Eastern cities choked under some of the worst air pollution on record. And then bloody syringes started washing ashore on New York beaches.

“It was an extraordinary confluence of events,” said former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, now counselor to the Wilderness Society. “There was all this bad news at once, and it gave environmental issues an urgency they didn’t have before.”

Nelson, who once advised John F. Kennedy to pursue a conservation theme in his own presidential campaign, also saw the bad news as a rare opportunity for the Democrats. “I assumed the Democrats would launch a heavy attack on the Reagan Administration’s environmental record. Go after acid rain, toxics, all the stuff where the Republicans are vulnerable.”

It has not worked out that way. To the surprise of professional conservationists, the first candidate to take an anti-pollution stand was Vice President George Bush, who stood beside a rejuvenated Lake Erie in August and promised to accelerate the government’s efforts to reduce toxic waste and clean urban air.

Meanwhile, Democrat Michael S. Dukakis has been curiously silent. In spite of urgings by environmental leaders to attack the Bush record on the environment--and in spite of his own relatively creditable environmental record as governor of Massachusetts--Dukakis has devoted time to the issue only in California and for only one day.

“I sense a reluctance (for Dukakis) to step forward on the environment,” said Edward Norton, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust. “It’s a mystery, because this is one issue the Democrats could hang around George Bush’s neck and twist until November.”

The frustration felt by environmentalists was demonstrated recently at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Wilderness Society, one of the nation’s largest conservation organizations. As a reporter sat talking with Nelson, executive director George Frampton poked his head into the doorway.

Dukakis Camp Inquiry

The Dukakis campaign had just called, he said, asking for advice about an upcoming trip to the fire zone at Yellowstone National Park.

Frampton rolled his eyes at the ceiling. The controversial Yellowstone fire policy is one of the few areas where environmentalists agree with the Reagan Administration. Frampton said he advised the candidate not to go at all; there was no political capital to be made in Yellowstone.

“I said they should take him (Dukakis) to Oregon, where he could talk about offshore oil,” Frampton said, and then shrugged, acknowledging that his advice probably would be rejected. “This is symptomatic of the campaign,” he said.

Frampton may be right. In the month after the Republican convention, the Bush organization repeatedly showed an ability to respond more quickly than the Dukakis staff to political opportunity. Bush’s early initiative on the environment was a good example.

But insiders in both campaigns say the reasons for Dukakis’ reticence are more complex and laced with irony. Dukakis has hesitated to play to the environmental vote, they say, precisely because it is the sort of thing expected of a mainline Democrat. Because Dukakis’ main task is to attract the votes of the so-called Reagan Democrats--conservative Democrats who voted for Reagan in the last two elections--he has kept his distance from such issues.

‘Preaching to Choir’

“There is the sense that if Dukakis goes after environmental issues, he is preaching to the choir,” said one adviser to the campaign who asked not to be identified. There is no evidence from the polls, the adviser added, that Reagan Democrats care deeply about environmental issues.

“It’s all economy, jobs, and being tough with the Russians. Nothing else has much credibility,” he said.

Bush, meanwhile, as he spoke out early on water pollution and toxics, was driven in part by a desire to cut across the grain, Republican pollsters say. Burdened with a environmental record that has been given low marks by environmental groups, Bush needed to “inoculate” himself against accusations that he has catered to polluters and does not care about environmental quality.

So Bush struck unexpectedly, first going to Michigan, shortly before Labor Day, where the candidate declared, “I am an environmentalist,” then moving on to Boston. There, he accused the Democratic candidate of hindering the cleanup of Boston Harbor during his terms as governor of Massachusetts. Bush raised the ante this week by introducing a campaign commercial--featuring slow motion footage of sludge, dead fish, raw sewage and trash--contending that Dukakis’ cleanup delays amounted to “the most expensive public policy mistake in the history of New England.”

The Boston maneuver was inspired by a similar tactic from George Deukmejian’s 1986 California gubernatorial campaign. Deukmejian neutralized challenger Tom Bradley’s advantage on the environmental issue by pointing out the Los Angeles mayor’s failure to control the city’s pollution of Santa Monica Bay.

Maneuver Seen as Effective

Even some conservationists admit that Bush’s maneuver was effective.

“Bush has an environmental record he can’t defend,” says James Maddy, executive director of the League of Conservation Voters. “What he did was raise the issue in a setting where he didn’t have to defend it. I think his goal was to get in and get out unscathed, and he did it.”

At this point in the campaign, the ire of conservationists seems aimed less at Bush than at Dukakis, largely because their expectations of the Democratic candidate were much higher. They argue that some environmental issues--industrial toxics, for example--could appeal strongly to Reagan Democrats if they are presented as threats to the health of workers or their children rather than rationales for more government regulation.

There are indications that the criticism is having an effect. The Dukakis staff says he will make a major address on environmental issues today at Rutgers University in New Jersey that will probably include a sharp attack on the Reagan Administration’s environmental policies.

It is that record, particularly in regard to the Environmental Protection Agency, that has earned Bush a low rating from conservation organizations. The League of Conservation Voters earlier gave the vice president a “D” grade. Dukakis was given a “B” and subsequently was endorsed by the group.

Cites Task Force Role

In a critique, the group faults the vice president mainly for his work as chairman of the Task Force on Regulatory Relief, a group that led the assault on many environmental constraints during the first term of the Reagan Administration.

The critique contends that the task force was responsible, or partly responsible, for delaying requirements to treat industrial toxic wastes, for imposing a freeze on the system for controlling hazardous wastes and for making it easier to win approval for new pesticides.

Perhaps the best-known episode occurred in 1981, when Bush instructed the EPA to consider a relaxation of regulations that would have further reduced lead in gasoline. Chronic exposure to lead causes brain damage and learning disabilities in children. The suggestion caused such a furor at the EPA and among conservation groups that the regulations eventually were actually tightened.

“Bush was the man standing at (task force) press conferences, taking credit for making things easier on industry. He is accountable for the task force’s work,” said the group’s Maddy. “He played an active role.”

The bitterness aroused in those years is still evident in some environmentalists, who express skepticism of Bush’s present claims. Russell Peterson, former Republican governor of Delaware who later headed the National Audubon Society, says Bush “has never showed any interest in the environment. On the contrary, he was an enthusiastic advocate of policies that were a catastrophe for the air and water.”

Russell Train, former head of the EPA under former President Richard M. Nixon and now chairman of the board of the World Wildlife Fund, disputes that view. Train is co-chairman of Conservationists for Bush and contends that the vice president’s true attitudes toward the environment did not surface during the Reagan years.

“In a low-key way, you now see him (Bush) distancing himself from the Reagan Administration on the environment,” Train said. “I think you are now seeing a more accurate picture of the real man.”

Though Dukakis has won generally high marks for his performance on pollution issues during his terms as governor of Massachusetts, he has also come under criticism.

Environmentalists regard his Boston Harbor shortcomings as particularly serious. The harbor, into which nearly 500 million gallons of industrial waste and barely treated sewage pour every day, is regarded as one of the most polluted waterways in the nation. In his first term from 1975 to 1979, Dukakis sought a delay in building waste-treatment facilities in compliance with the federal Clean Water Act on the ground that the state, then in financial trouble, could not afford it.

Since Dukakis returned to office in 1983, Massachusetts has begun the task of building the needed facilities, but the cleanup is behind schedule and the expected cost has soared to an estimated $6 billion. Meanwhile, federal support for sewage-treatment facilities has all but evaporated under Reagan, so Massachusetts residents will have to absorb nearly the entire cost of the cleanup.

On the other hand, the League’s critique says, the Dukakis administration was the first in the nation to ban several pesticides suspected of causing cancer, fought to stop oil leasing off the New England coast--particularly on the Georges Bank--and led his fellow New England governors in an effort to reduce acid rain.

“If you get his attention, he (Dukakis) will usually do the right thing,” said one former conservation official in Massachusetts who asked not to be named. “The problem is getting his attention. Environmental issues are not a personal passion with Dukakis.”

In the California address that Dukakis devoted to conservation, he pledged also to elevate the EPA to a Cabinet-level department if he is elected President.

The EPA proposal is one of the very few specific proposals made by either candidate. The scarcity of serious attention given the issue and lack of real debate has left conservationists frustrated.

“We’ve got problems that appear to be threatening the ability of the planet to support life, and so far we’ve had what? Two or three days devoted to these issues?” said Nelson of the Wilderness Society.

“You wonder what it would take to really get their attention. It baffles me.”