GOP Bills Put Focus on ‘Green’ Issues : Environment: Activists are looking to President Clinton for stronger support to counter proposals to reverse protective measures.

In 1994, after Bill Clinton’s first year in the White House, the League of Conservation Voters issued a report card that showed environmentalists’ disappointment in a President they had helped elect: “C+: not working up to potential.”

This year, after a string of setbacks to their cause in Congress, the environmentalists were so dismayed by Clinton’s failure to come to their rescue that they did not issue a report card.

But today, the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, leaders of the nation’s environmental organizations are looking hopefully toward Clinton one more time--and hailing signs that the President has rediscovered ecology as an issue that might help him win reelection in 1996.

“It isn’t his favorite issue,” acknowledged Jim Maddy, president of the league, the environmental movement’s political action committee. “He’s got a tin ear for it. He’d rather talk about jobs. But the politician in him is confronting the cold reality that he’s at 43% and he needs to get to 51%.

“We have a lot of voters and he can have them for free,” Maddy added. “He doesn’t have to change his policies. All he’s got to do is learn the lingo and do a couple of events.”

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On Friday, Clinton made a gesture in that direction by traveling to Havre de Grace, Md., at the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay, to warn that three pending Republican bills jeopardize clean air and water and even the public health. “Our natural security must be considered part of our national security,” Clinton declared in a speech that marked his longest treatment of environmental issues in the last year.

A White House political strategist agreed on the issue’s potential.

“The environment is one of the issues we can use to appeal to swing voters and suburbanites. . . ,” he said, “not just in California but all across the country.” That might sound elementary for a Democratic President who won his job with a platform that included environmental protection. But for most of the last two years, the Clinton Administration has been riven by internal debate between its “greens” and “browns”--its committed environmentalists, led by Vice President Al Gore, and its more business-oriented economic officials--over how much of the environmental agenda to push.

In practice, the environment often has ended up on the back burner, behind an economic stimulus package, deficit reduction, health care and welfare reform. When Clinton did stick his neck out--with a proposal to increase grazing fees for ranchers using federal land, for example--he encountered a storm of protest from the mountain West that gave him little encouragement to do more.

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So there was quiet jubilation among environmental organizations this month when Clinton, in several speeches and a news conference, listed Republican proposals to weaken environmental regulations among the measures he would veto.

“I cannot and I will not compromise any clean water, any clean air, any protection against toxic waste,” Clinton said in Dallas earlier this month. “The environment cannot protect itself. And if it requires a presidential veto to protect it, then that’s what I’ll provide.”

Two things happened to prompt Clinton to turn a little greener: the Republican victory in last November’s election and a determined lobbying effort by environmental groups.

The change in Congress turned Clinton’s attention from a wish list of Democratic initiatives to a desperate struggle to stop the conservative Republican juggernaut.

As a result, Clinton and his aides no longer need to worry about potential conflicts among their economic agenda, their desire to reduce government regulation and their environmental agenda. Instead, they can focus on opposing the new GOP majority’s agenda of reversing a long list of environmental regulations.

“The President and the environmentalists suddenly have a lot more in common,” Maddy said.

Clinton isn’t proposing any new measures to protect the environment. Instead, he’s casting himself as a moderate who will stop the Republicans from “rolling back” existing measures.

Environmental groups have funded a series of polls and focus-group studies to show that environmental protection is still a popular idea--and to convince Clinton that he can profit by taking up their cause.

In one poll, 73% of respondents said they believe that the government has gone too far in regulating businesses, a favorite Republican argument--but 77% said that they support regulation that makes the environment cleaner.

“People are opposed to big government but they aren’t opposed to environmental regulations,” said Celinda Lake of Lake Research, who directed one of the studies.

When Geoff Garin, another Democratic pollster and Clinton adviser, told focus groups that the Republicans’ proposals would hamper efforts to protect the environment, some voters responded with anger.

“The Republicans rushed regulatory reform through the House . . . without telling anyone that it would affect the environment,” Garin said, exaggerating a little. “When you change the issue from one of process to one of consequences, people react.”

As a result, Clinton, Gore and the environmental groups will spend considerable time in coming months trying to redefine the issue by describing the consequences of deregulation as apocalyptic for the environment: polluted air, dirty water and despoiled forests.

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In his remarks Friday, for example, Clinton warned that the House-passed bill calling for a regulatory moratorium would block legislation that might be needed to stave off a public health catastrophe.

He cited the 1993 contamination of Milwaukee’s water supply, which killed 100 people, and the 1993 bacterial contamination of hamburger meat that sickened hundreds.

The GOP legislation “would stop good regulations, bad regulations, all regulations,” Clinton said.

Other pending Republican bills would reduce federal action on water pollution, allow more logging in national forests and make it more difficult to declare animals or plants endangered species.

Clinton has said that he will veto most of those bills if they come to his desk in their current form. Maddy and other environmentalists said they hope that the President--a notorious conciliator--gets to keep his promise.

“My fear is that the Senate will improve these bills a little bit, and he will sign them,” Maddy said. “I’d almost rather see the Senate rush these things through with no changes.”

Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this story.