Christine Todd Whitman is the former Governor of New Jersey (1994-2001) and former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (2001-2003). She currently serves on the board of Americans Elect.
HPR: How do you think responsible environmental regulation can be reconciled with the kind of small-government pro-growth agenda that anyone in the Republican Party would want to govern under?
CTW: I hope they remember that in 1970, when Richard Nixon established the EPA, it was done because rivers were spontaneously combusting, people were going to the emergency room in the summer over bad air quality, and we were turning our land into a great big garbage dump. It was the public that came from the bottom up, and they said ‘we don’t like living like this, you’ve got to make these changes’. To throw out the regulations would be ridiculous.
It would be ideal to go back in and take a look at the enabling legislation that established the agency because it’s very restrictive and prescriptive. The agency doesn’t have a lot of flexibility, but when you look at the country, the problems you face and the way you’d solve problems in Maine are different from those you find in Texas. Things like water and air are different. Pressures on the land are different. There’s a different geography. It’s totally different. Yet, as happens with federal laws, there’s one set for everybody, and there’s very little flexibility. Yet that [flexibility] is exactly what we need in order to fix these problems.
HPR: What do you think is the future for moderates in the Republican Party?
CTW: Well, I don’t know whether it’s going to take another thrashing at the polls for Republicans to figure out they need to be a little broader. At this point, I’m not sanguine that the party is going to change much before another cycle because I’ve watched Reince Priebus, after the whole great internal examination that they did, come out and say, “Well, we’ve got to change the messenger. We’ve got to change where we put the message.” You want to say no: you have to change the message. It’s not the messenger. It’s not how you package the message. It’s not where you put it, it’s the message. I don’t see, at this point, much of an appetite to truly change the message.
The one good thing is that you do see, through No Labels particularly, Congresspeople finally starting to come together and recognizing that there’s far more that brings us together than divides us.
In the last election Mitt Romney got 4.2 million more self-identified Christian conservatives than John McCain had gotten, and John McCain got about 2.5 million more than George W. Bush had in his re-election. The point being: the base came out, they had the base and we had our heads handed to us; we can’t win with that base. We have to broaden it.
HPR: I know you said the Republican Party needs to change the message. How would you best change the message without turning the people on the far right into antagonists who would start pouring money into opposing Republicans in the general election?
CTW: I think [it would be possible] if you came forward with a platform that got back to the basic principles that used to define the Republican Party: respect for the individual as evidenced by less government interference in everyday life and allowing people to keep more of the money they earned, an engaged foreign policy, strong national defense, respect for the shared environment, and that’s it. We don’t need to have a position as a party on every single social issue that you can imagine. Even in families people don’t agree on everything. How could you expect a national party of hundreds of thousands of candidates to agree on it? You can’t, and yet we try.
We could start by going back to [the old way of writing platforms]. I always liked my father’s definition of parties. When I asked him about it, he said parties are like umbrellas: you have the handle, which is the central core and the shared ideals, and then you have the ribs which hold up the canopy, and those are different ways of interpreting those ideals, but they’re all under the same canopy. That means you can have people that are pro-choice and pro-life in the same party. They don’t have to be enemies.
HPR: How did you feel about Americans Elect not working out?
CTW: Well, I’m disappointed, but we had 450,000 delegates and over 2.5 million people that had signed petitions to get us on the ballot. But it was just such a new idea. You had an incumbent president, so it was very hard for the Democrats to step up and say they don’t like their president, and there was an heir apparent as a Republican. You had a number of candidates who were right at the edge then pulled back. I was on the board at the time; I thought we did the right thing. We talked about it, but we had a standard. We said by a date certain they had to have had a thousand hits from 10 states, that’s all we required of the candidates, and nobody had done it. We had a lot of pressure from second and third tier candidates to keep it going, but we didn’t want to go that way. We had set the standard; we were on the ballot in 35 states.
This interview has been edited and condensed.