In the second part of a two-part interview, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman told NJ Today’s Managing Editor Mike Schneider that Gov. Chris Christie showed “enormous leadership” during the Sandy crisis.
“He really showed what we elect our leaders to do, which is to lead, which is to get out there and say this isn’t partisan politics, this is policy,” said Whitman.
She expressed disappointment with some members of the Republican Party who criticized Gov. Christie’s embrace of President Obama during his visit to New Jersey after the storm, saying she would have done exactly what Christie did.
“[President Obama] has the keys to the kingdom in the sense that he has the keys to the money, you’re gonna thank him, you should,” she said.
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To do otherwise, she says, would have been a disservice to the people of New Jersey. While the focus has been on Christie’s performance in the immediate aftermath of the storm, Whitman praised the governor’s handling of Sandy before it hit New Jersey. “He was upfront with it, he was taking all the projections seriously, he was out there telling people that they should get out [and] he activated the emergency management center early on and listened to them.”
Gov. Christie has been working with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a coordinated effort to seek federal relief for rebuilding. Setting aside party differences, as the two governors are doing, is exactly what governance and politics are about, says Whitman, who was reminded of her days as governor and going to the National Governors Association meetings.
She said, “The best part of going to the National Governors Association, I always felt, was I didn’t know the other governors were Republican or Democrat. It didn’t make a difference. We were facing the same kind of problems of how we do best by our constituents.”
On a number of occasions, Whitman has lamented the state of the current Republican Party, saying it’s not the same party that she grew up with. She says the results of the presidential election should serve as a wake-up call for the GOP to do some soul-searching.
“We cannot be a national relevant party if you’re going to lose women by 11 percent, and Hispanics by 40 percent, and 90 percent of the black vote and the 18-29-year-old vote by significant numbers,” she said. “God bless old white men but they’re not going to be significant enough to allow us to be a relevant party in the future.”
Her frustration with the current Republican Party led her to become involved with the group Americans Elect and its efforts to support a candidate outside of the two national parties.
“It was an online nominating process to nominate a Republican and a Democrat … whoever won the presidential nomination would nominate someone from the other party. But we had standards in place and a time in place as to when people had to reach certain goals and nobody did that within the time frame,” Whitman explained.
The initiative failed to garner enough interest in time for this year’s election. “We were on the ballot in 35 states and would have been on the ballot in all 50 states had we continued the effort, but we cut it off when we did not have a candidate who met the criteria that we laid out.”
From 2001 to 2003, Whitman served as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush. The EPA has been a frequent target of some GOP members like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who supports the elimination of the federal agency. Such a proposal baffles Whitman who points out that the EPA was started by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970 as a “response to very real needs that average people brought up.”
Whitman said the EPA grew out of a public outcry in which “people were tired of being hospitalized in the summer because of bad air quality, seeing rivers spontaneously combust and the fact that we were turning the land into a garbage dump.”
Opponents argue that the EPA stifles economic growth with overly burdensome regulations. Whitman counters that the EPA’s actions have in fact improved the quality of life, and dismisses any claims that it acts against business interests.
“Between 1970 and 1990 — our economy in 2000 did very, very well — that’s when EPA was actually implementing all these regulations and enforcing them. So you can’t blame the economic downturn on the agency.”
Still, Whitman recognizes the agency has over-reached at times, saying “they’ve gotten way ahead of technology, trying to do what they thought was right for human health and the environment, but they’ve gone too far at times. So there needs to be a balance.”
Whitman has been out of public office for quite some time but says she is open to any opportunity that allows her to work in public policy.
Related: New Jersey Must Adjust to Climate Change in Rebuilding, Says Christie Whitman