How James Watt Survives
WASHINGTON D.C.
The good news about James Watt, I suppose, is that his spring offensive has failed. The bad news, of course, is that this twisted man remains in power as secretary of the interior, continuing his damage to the public good.
Two months ago, Watt launched a public-relations blitz to brighten his image. Mr. Motormouth appeared on all the TV news talk shows with his mendacious charts and gave soulful interviews to usually hostile organs like the Washington Post. Like his leader in the White House, he told lots of lies about himself and his programs.
Watt’s political problem was obvious, even to his friends: the public-opinion polls, including those taken by the White House, show that he is both the best-known member of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet and the most despised. Americans simply do not share his rip-and-ruin view of our natural resources, land, water, parks and wilderness.
Fortunately, Watt is the Earl Butz of the Reagan administration. He cannot speak without reminding us of his bizarre vision of American society. He likens environmentalists to Nazis. He describes Indian tribal rights as socialism. He confuses the Vegas sleaze of Wayne Newton with middle-class values. He compares his own “persecution” by the media with what Hitler did to the Jews. Watt’s denunciation of the Beach Boys as the “wrong element” for Fourth of July concerts on the Mall was so loony that even the Reagan White House was compelled to dissent. The president’s staff staged a clever mea culpa for the interior secretary, in which he appeared on the White House lawn and ate his own words. By May, Watt’s standing in the polls had sunk lower than ever.
Yet he survives. How does he do it? Crass political logic, plus a decent regard for public opinion, would dictate the hook for Watt, especially if Reagan really intends to run for reelection next year. Watt is now an embarrassment, a perfect symbol of Reagan’s own wrongheaded values: his desire to reward special interests like big oil at the public’s expense, to gut any form of law enforcement that displeases the business managers. The White House staff, one assumes, would like to engineer his removal, just as they shuffled Anne Gorsuch Burford offstage from the scandal-ridden Environmental Protection Agency. Some do want Watt’s resignation, but they dare not push for it.
As a practical matter, the only person who can fire James Watt is James Watt. The interior secretary has fashioned a clever form of job security for himself: the more audacious he is, the more he appeals to right-wingers whom the administration can ill afford to offend. The man may be twisted, but he’s not dumb –– though if he is truly smart about politics, he will do the Gipper a favor and quit long before the election season begins.
The explanation behind this begins with Reagan himself. He loves what Watt is trying to do. They share the same retrograde instincts about the environment and the West, and no amount of carping from critics or public scandal will change that. Former senator Gaylord Nelson, who is now chairman of the Wilderness Society, puts it this way: “Watt only has two constituents – Reagan and the Lord. If you’ve got both of them on your side, you don’t have to worry about anyone else.”
Beyond that fundamental point, however, Watt’s political status gets trickier than his environmental critics like to acknowledge. For starters, intense as anti-Watt sentiment is, it is not nearly as strong as many imagine. Polls consistently show that among those citizens who have an opinion about the man, he draws negative ratings of two to one, or worse. That’s extraordinary hostility for a second-rung cabinet officer. But the same polls show that at least half of the population has no feeling about Watt one way or the other. Either they don’t know who he is, or they don’t care.
“It doesn’t exactly put us in a death sweat,” explains Rich Bond, director of political operations for the Republican National Committee. One explanation for this is that Watt, as controversial as he makes himself, is not directly associated with the life-and-death environmental issues that arouse the most public alarm –– toxic wastes, cancer-causing chemicals, air and water pollution. Behind the scenes, Watt has had a big hand in those issues, but his most visible turf is government land. His depredations do not seem as threatening.
Still, the political damage is real. White House analysts understand –– even if the president doesn’t –– that those”environmental extremists” Reagan regularly denounces include a lot of suburban Republicans and independents who voted for Reagan and who loathe James Watt. Watt by himself might not push them into voting Democratic, but he gives them a strong nudge.
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