Sununu vs. Reilly: Missing the Steak, Seeing the Sizzle : Environment: Forget the hype, the EPA chief is not being outmaneuvered by the White House chief of staff. Their clash is one of job descriptions.

The Washington pundit class loves tales of personality conflicts at senior levels. Speculating about who’s knifing whom is more fun than addressing that annoyance, the issues. In this spirit, the recent, heavily hyped “clash” between White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator William K. Reilly has been, to columnists and the shout-show circuit, just what the doctor ordered.

After all, there are several important environmental regulations in the works and they are, well, complicated. Proposed ecological legislation is so full of statistics, technical terms, mathematical formulas--you would practically have to read the stuff to have an opinion (unless you’re booked on “The McLaughlin Group”). A clash of presidential advisers, on the other hand: What could make more fertile fields for instant punditry?

According to the conventional wisdom, Sununu is insidiously taking over Bush Administration environmental policy, hanging Reilly out to dry. Supposedly, this is because Sununu is a tree-hating anti-environmental monster and he has true access to the President, while Reilly is just a show horse. Reflecting this, a score card on insider Washington recently labeled Sununu a “walking toxic-waste dump.” Meanwhile the preferred insider’s catty comment about Reilly is an oblique reference to “the male model.” Reilly is photogenic--can’t say that of many policy types--and dresses sharply.

As is customary with conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom about the Reilly-Sununu maneuvering is all wrong. First, though Sununu is to Reilly’s political right, he has not sabotaged environmental policy. Second, Reilly has far more access to George Bush than is commonly understood--partly through personal connections. Third, a year as EPA administrator is beginning to gray Reilly’s hair (he is 50), which pretty much counts out any career as a model.

The belief that Sununu is “sabotaging” environmental legislation stems from the pundit class’s horror at the thought of actually having to ponder the details of environmental initiatives. Thus, when Bush recently gave a speech on global warming to a United Nations affiliate, pundits fixated on the fact that Sununu admitted rewriting portions of the text.

The actual changes Sununu made were minor. He substituted “climate change” wherever “global warning” had appeared (some scientists consider the former phrase more precise) and struck out as premature a Reilly-backed call for consideration of a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. (Note to environmentalists: A carbon-dioxide tax would discourage use of fossil fuels and be a huge boost to nuclear power.)

But accounts of Sununu’s rewrite barely mentioned the substance of the changes. They focused on the style aspects of one senior presidential adviser overruling another, and whether Reilly’s star was declining.

Reports of the speech hoo-ha also skipped over the fact that Sununu did not challenge the idea that global warming is a serious prospect--that would have been true sabotage. Instead, Sununu objected to the notion that warming has been detected--which many scientists challenge, too. Similarly, when Sununu intervened last month to insert a loophole into some new wetlands regulations, the loophole got all the play; overlooked was that Sununu endorsed the regulations, which are going to make development of billions of U.S. acres far more difficult.

As recently as a few months ago, conventional wisdom was quite impressed that Reilly was a frequent visitor to the White House. In his first six months on the job he went there more than all previous EPA administrators combined. Reilly has been an animated participant in meetings of the Domestic Policy Council, despite not being a Cabinet secretary--that’s slated to change as EPA is elevated to a Cabinet status--and he frequently lobbied Bush in person for environmental rules. After Sununu asserted himself, however, suddenly Reilly’s access was declared all show.

A key missed clue: Reilly sees the President socially . Reilly and his wife have been guests at state dinners, gone to the theater with the Bushes and so on.

Reilly is on social terms with Bush partly because of a real-estate coincidence. After leaving the U.S. Senate in the early 1960s, Prescott Bush, the President’s father, bought a house in Hobe Sound, Fla., a fashionable address north of Palm Beach. Near the Bush house was a home owned by Russell E. Train, a GOP Establishment figure and, until Reilly’s selection, the only professional conservationist ever to head the EPA. The Bush and Train families became socially close; Train supported Bush in many campaigns.

Train was Reilly’s mentor, the two worked together on many environmental projects--including the World Wildlife Fund. Reilly came to know Bush through Train, and when Bush asked Train’s advice on who to pick for EPA, Train pushed for Reilly. The two hit it off--that Reilly was a Yalie like Bush didn’t hurt.

Bush’s political quandary on the environment is that he must satisfy three constituencies: old-line Establishment Republicans of his father’s cut, who are pro-conservation either through personal conviction or elitism; new-money pro-development Republicans, who are no longer reflexively anti-environment but won’t abide any disruption of growth, and the general voting public, which, in 1992, may well judge Bush on whether his 1988 environmental promises are carried out.

The status of the new Clean Air Act, the most important environmental initiative in 10 years, is a gauge of how the politics of environmentalism are shaking out in the new Administration. The new act is designed to reduce urban smog, acid rain and toxic air emissions from factories dramatically .

At the very time the Washington press was going loopers over Sununu’s tinkering with the global-warming speech, Reilly, White House Domestic Policy Adviser Roger B. Porter and Office of Management and Budget officer Robert E. Grady were engaged in extended negotiations aimed at heading off a potential collapse of the new Clean Air Act in the Senate.

There is already a version of the new act more or less finished in the House; Bush and most House environmentalists are on record as basically accepting it. The Senate bill, however, contained a number of provisions that White House analysts felt would lead to substantial consumer price increases but only infinitesimal ecological gains--mainly in categories where a large amount of pollution could be wiped out for an affordable price, but the final few percentage points might cost an arm and a leg.

For example, new cars emit only about 4% as much pollution as cars of 1970, when national emissions control began. Under the new act that figure will drop to about 2%, for a reasonable cost. Environmentalists were pushing for a further reduction to under 1%, which Administration analysts believed would add half again as much to the $19-billion estimated cost.

As the Senate version of the Clean Air Act grew more expensive, word began to circulate that Bush might veto it. Perversely, this prospect was attractive to Democrats. If “the environmental President” vetoed the most important piece of environmental legislation in a decade, Democrats would have a perfect issue for the 1992 campaign.

Then last week, in a rare fit of civic responsibility, senators reached agreement with Reilly and the rest of the Administration team on a version of the bill acceptable both to Bush and most liberals.

Points of interest from the negotiations:

Sununu didn’t try to slip loopholes into the new bill. He has, in fact, favored several ecological advances. Sununu is convinced acid rain is for real. As governor of New Hampshire he backed state legislation requiring a 50% cut in industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide, the chief acid-rain precursor. That bill has since been copied by many states, and a roughly 50% reduction nationally is embodied in both versions of the Clean Air Act.

Both environmental and industry lobbyists have expressed outrage over the Senate compromise--an indication that it does a good job of splitting the middle.

Sununu may continue to be painted as the heavy throughout the Bush Administration’s environmental maneuverings. Because the President’s chief of staff is a political operative, it is typical for him to be used in the bad-cop role or as a lightning rod on economic issues. (Remember Donald T. Regan?) Reilly is showing loyalty to his President by pressuring him to support dramatic environmental legislation: If Bush doesn’t come through here, on one of his few specific campaign promises, there could be hell to pay in 1992.

Whatever else Sununu is, he is a political animal who understands this equation. “Sabotaging” environmental reform would only sabotage Bush’s chances for reelection, and Sununu is not that stupid.