The Green Elephant: Spring 2008
 

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He was campaigning, not ducking

In his bid for the presidential
 nomination, Arizona Sen. John
 McCain hasn’t shied away from
citing his differences with
Republican orthodoxy on the environment. He’s touted a Senate
bill he is sponsoring to reduce
 carbon dioxide emissions to
combat global warming.

 It’s a bill that has won McCain
lots of friends in the environmental
 movement. So it was a surprise
when Sierra Club executive director
 Carl Pope sent out a missive
 condemning McCain as an ally
of polluters. Urging Club
supporters to spread the word
about McCain’s poor environmental
 record in the Senate, Pope said
 McCain had “a history of siding
with the polluters and special
 interests, and a consistent pattern
of ducking important
environmental votes.”
REP’s David Jenkins notes
that McCain had a good excuse
for missing votes: He was running
for president against
GOP challengers who had
no similar commitments to keep
them from the campaign trail.
Nor could McCain easily coordinate
 his absences with the Senate
 Majority Leader, Harry Reid of
 Nevada, who schedules votes
and was more accommodating to
his Democratic colleagues,
Clinton and Obama.

Indeed, McCain did miss 15
 environmental votes in 2007.
He also missed five environmental
 votes scored by the League in 1999,
 during his prior bid for the
White House. But those years
 excepted, McCain has missed
only three of 212 votes scored
by the League since McCain’s first
 year in the Senate, 1987. That’s
not a consistent pattern.
The Sierra Club’s charge, therefore,
is False.

"Truth-o-meter" analysis by
PoliFact.com
St. Petersburg Times

 

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REP Takes on the Sierra Club

by REP Policy Director Jim DiPeso

Since REP’s founding in 1995, we have served as a clear voice calling attention to the many poor choices that recent Republican leaders have made on “green” issues. We’ve urged them to vote for good legislative initiatives and against bad ones, often joining with other groups to amplify our message.

REP’s mission is not to serve as scolds, but to restore the GOP’s great conservation tradition. We’ve waited a long time for the chance to support a presidential nominee who not only promises to begin that restoration but also has the track record to back his promises up.

That day has arrived. Senator John McCain—whom we endorsed for president early last year—hauled his campaign off the mat, threaded the needle, and emerged as the GOP’s presumptive nominee following the Super Tuesday primaries in February.

And so, for the first time in REP’s lifetime, a GOP candidate who aims to restore what he calls the “Teddy Roosevelt tradition” will be carrying our party’s banner next fall.

This changes the ways that REP operates in the political arena. We’ll be vigorously working to the extent allowed by law, in public and behind the scenes, for McCain’s election as president, because we see this as a major step forward in turning our party around on environmental and conservation issues.

In supporting him, we may well get crosswise with environmental groups that jump on the Democratic nominee’s bandwagon and allow partisan considerations to trump a truly unique opportunity to build positive, win-win relationships with both nominees for president.

Following Super Tuesday, it didn’t take long for some “non-partisan” environmental organizations to begin a systematic campaign of attacks that falsely painted McCain—this scourge of pork-barrel spending, friend of wilderness, and champion of climate cap-and-trade legislation—as a stooge for polluters.

The Sierra Club, for example, quickly let fly two news releases attacking McCain and four e-mail broadsides urging its million-plus members to write blistering letters to their local newspapers denouncing the Arizona senator.

It’s important to remember that REP and the Sierra Club have been allies more often than not. We have supported the Club’s positions on many occasions when good laws and our public lands heritage were under siege by misguided Republicans. REP President Martha Marks stood beside Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope at a January 2001 press conference in Washington, where they both urged the Senate to reject President-elect Bush’s nomination of Gale Norton as Interior Secretary. Martha was the guest speaker at a Club board meeting a few years later. The Club has published articles by and about REP in Sierra magazine. Many REP members also belong to the Sierra Club.

Still, despite this collegial history, REP could not sit still for what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s political columnist Joel Connelly** called the Sierra Club’s “sucker punches.” We were not about to remain silent as the Club indulged in a partisan tirade against a GOP presidential candidate who has compiled an admirable environmental record—often taking positions that mightily displeased other GOP leaders and put McCain’s political career at great risk.

After getting nowhere with personal letters and phone calls from Martha to top leaders of the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, REP went public in defense of McCain. We issued a press release taking the Sierra Club to task for its “recent barrage of inflammatory rhetoric distorting the senator’s environmental record.”

REP’s defense of McCain has received a lot of media attention. In addition to Connelly’s influential column in the Seattle P-I, our release was picked up by Congressional Quarterly, Forbes, AP, and other major news outlets. REP’s staff also has spoken up for McCain in reports published or aired by the Detroit Free Press, Miami Herald, National Journal, Bloomberg News Service, Gannett News Service, National Public Radio and others... even the Guardian, published in London.

In addition, we prepared and posted on our website an overview of the environmental record that Senator McCain has compiled during his 25 years in Congress, which details the substantial political capital that he has expended to increase congressional support for cap-and-trade climate legislation.

Many of you, our members, also leaped to McCain’s defense by writing letters to local newspapers, sending protest letters to the Sierra Club, and sharing REP’s refutation with friends.

It’s clear that the election-year fun has just begun. The 2008 presidential campaign, which already seems to have gone on for eons, is still in its early stages. We have plenty of work ahead: advising McCain’s campaign about “conservative conservationist” policies, getting out the word about his good environmental record, and responding with the truth to many more “sucker punches” that will be coming thick and fast as Election Day draws near.

We’ll be calling on REP members for grassroots energy and support as this campaign season moves forward. By working for a McCain victory in November, REP can make dramatic progress in achieving its mission while helping the nation overcome its decades-long partisan divide on environmental issues.

McCain’s nomination is a golden opportunity that we at REP cannot pass by, and we intend to take full advantage of it.