Bush, Clinton Clash Over Jobs, Environment

President Bush vowed Monday to force major revisions in the Endangered Species Act as he and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton clashed over jobs and the environment in the Pacific Northwest.

Bush, posing in front of two flatbed trucks piled high with timber in this northern Washington town, said he would refuse to sign an extension of the 19-year-old law--one of the nation’s key environmental statutes--unless Congress rewrote it to allow economic considerations to override the preservation of species.

“It’s time to make people more important than owls,” Bush said. “The time has come to talk sensibly. When hundreds of mills have been shut down, thousands of timber workers thrown out of work, and revenues for schools and other services have been slashed, the balance has been lost.”

Clinton aides said the Democratic candidate would oppose such moves. But the candidate himself, speaking in Portland, Ore., and later meeting in Eugene with a group of families who had lost jobs in the timber industry, made only scant references to Bush’s proposal. Instead, he stressed his basic economic message, telling a large and enthusiastic noontime rally in Portland that “George Bush, trickle down, that’s what is the problem.”

The two sharply differing speeches illustrated the divergent strategies the Bush and Clinton campaigns have adopted. Bush pushes different issues in each region of the country as he seeks to find ways to divide Clinton’s supporters while Clinton tries to stick to his central economic message, hoping to hold together a coalition that is potentially united over basic economic issues but in danger of cracking on others, such as environmental protection.

Even as Arkansas Gov. Clinton tries to stress his economic theme, however, he continues to face interference from nagging questions about his recollection of his actions during the Vietnam-era draft. Monday morning, he abruptly decided to change his schedule and fly from Oregon to Utah, where he will address the National Guard Assn. convention in Salt Lake City immediately after Bush does. Campaign aides expect Bush to use his speech there to raise questions about Clinton and the draft and plan for Clinton to use the forum in yet another attempt to put the issue to rest.

The back-to-back speeches could be the closest the two candidates get to a direct debate anytime soon as their campaigns appeared headed for a prolonged argument over the terms and conditions for formal debates.

Monday morning, Bush’s campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter sent a letter to the Clinton campaign setting out the President’s terms for debates but rejecting a bipartisan commission’s plan for three debates starting next week in East Lansing, Mich.

Clinton’s campaign, which has already accepted the commission’s plan, rejected Teeter’s proposal and accused Bush of “running and hiding.”

“There’s no counteroffer,” said Clinton campaign chairman Mickey Kantor, adding that the two campaigns should discuss the schedule and ground rules for the debates with the commission. “The commission has spent six years studying this subject” of how best to stage debates, Kantor said, repeating the campaign’s vow to be in East Lansing next week whether Bush shows up or not.

Bush Proposal

As the Endangered Species Act now stands, economic considerations can be used to override protections for species only in extreme circumstances employing a rare appeals process. Bush’s plan called on Congress to permit the government routinely to take economic factors into account.

Siding squarely with lumber interests in a dispute over protection for the endangered spotted owl, Bush transformed a remote mill 45 miles from the Canadian border into a campaign stage.

In depicting his own approach as both balanced and prudent, Bush sought to portray Clinton and his running mate, Sen. Al Gore, as environmentalists run amok whose extreme agenda would do damage to the nation’s economy. Bush strategists hope that approach will help him not only in the Northwest but particularly in the crucial battleground states of the Rust Belt, where the Administration has also pushed environmental concerns.

In the case of the spotted owl, the Administration has already tried and failed to persuade Congress to waive the strict provisions of the act, which would require restrictions on logging over 5.4 million acres of the Pacific Northwest in order to help the species recover.

The Administration contends that the plan would force the loss of about 32,000 jobs, and wants permission instead to implement a more modest preservation plan that would allow nearly twice as much logging and save far fewer owls, but would also preserve an estimated 17,000 jobs.

In choosing Monday to go beyond that proposal, Bush embarked on a far more confrontational election-year approach. Among the species that could be affected under the Administration plan are the Pacific salmon, the Delta smelt, and the California gnatcatcher, a small songbird whose listing as an endangered species would be a barrier to Southern California development.

Environmental activists quickly denounced Bush’s proposal.

Bush, however, insisted that the Endangered Species Act is “broken and it must be fixed.”

Bush’s threat to turn back efforts to renew the Endangered Species Act carries little weight, because Congress has not acted on the measure since 1988 and is not expected to do so this year.

But Administration officials said the White House would attempt to persuade Congress to endorse the changed approach to species protection in an Interior appropriations bill pending before a congressional conference committee.

Steven Goldstein, an Interior Department spokesman, held out the possibility that Bush might veto the appropriations measure unless Congress accedes to his request.

Only twice in the 19-year history of the endangered species act--in the cases of the snail darter and northern spotted owl--has the federal government convened its so-called God Squad to review whether proposed environmental protection might bring unacceptable economic harm.

Administration officials said Monday that that procedure is far too cumbersome to ensure the needed balance between the environment and jobs.

Bush also announced immediate good news for the state’s timber industry, saying he would amend federal regulations to require that all logs harvested on Washington’s public lands be milled within the state.

The change from the previous 75% home-milled requirement is designed to halt an exodus that has seen vast quantities of raw timber shipped direct to Japan for milling there at significant cost to Washington jobs.

Clinton’s Response

Clinton insisted that the Administration was posing a “false choice” between jobs and the environment. “I know you can be pro-environment and pro-growth,” he told his Portland audience.

Later, speaking to families in a house in a middle-class neighborhood here, Clinton called for a policy of “no net loss of jobs.”

Over the last 3 1/2 years, 46,000 timber industry jobs had been lost in the Northwest, he said. And the issue for the next four years is to “figure out what is the right thing to do for a long-term sustainable forest” that keeps people working “and preserve the necessary diversity” to protect the environment, Clinton said. In the meantime, he said, the government should seek to foster alternative ways to provide jobs for people displaced from the timber industry.

But Clinton made no specific proposals about how to accomplish those goals, saying that if he were elected he would hold a summit meeting with regional leaders and would defer final decisions until then.

Bush has denounced that type of approach as a “straddle” designed to avoid tough decisions.

Clinton in return has accused Bush of being cynical, saying he seeks to divide Americans in pursuit of political gain. The President’s strategy is one of “denying our problems and dividing our people,” he said.

Overall, however, Clinton’s main strategy has been to avoid detailed discussions of divisive issues--whether they be the spotted owl here or abortion in the heavily Roman Catholic states of the Midwest--and to try to keep voters strictly focused on the economic malaise of the last three years.

So far, that strategy appears to be working. Polls, including a new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday night, show Clinton having widened his lead over Bush in the last week, and both campaigns agree that Clinton is ahead in most of the election’s key battleground states.

Draft Issue

Bush aides hope the controversy over Clinton’s draft record could become the one issue that turns those polls around.

For the last couple of weeks, Clinton and his aides have hoped the story over whether he has been forthright in his discussion of his record would die down if they refused to discuss it. Last week, in fact, the campaign turned down an invitation to appear at the National Guard convention, feeling that a speech in Utah--one of the few states in which Bush now holds a clear lead--would serve little purpose.

But Sunday, the White House announced that Bush would speak to the convention rather than Vice President Dan Quayle. Fearing that Bush would use the forum to make a high-profile assault on the draft issue, Clinton’s aides scrambled to change their plans, rearranging several events he had been scheduled to conduct in the Bay Area today.

Clinton aides continued to insist their polls show the draft issue is not hurting his support.

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Rudy Abramson, in Washington, contributed to this story.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Salt Lake City. He speaks at San Jose State University and attends a private event in San Francisco.

Sen. Al Gore campaigns in Orange County.

President Bush campaigns in Salt Lake City, Denver and Albuquerque.