Bush’s Ex-EPA Chief Visits IOP

It’s been 42 years since Christine Todd Whitman had her first job “working on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign for the Presidency in 1964,” and now, she’s hoping that the next President will be a moderate Republican in Rockefeller’s mold, she told The Crimson in an interview yesterday.

Whitman—who served as the first female governor of New Jersey from 1994–2001 before being named to President George W. Bush’s Cabinet as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency—now runs a political action committee, It’s My Party Too, which works to elect moderate Republicans. She spent the past few days at Harvard as a Visiting IOP Fellow, during which time she met with campus groups and hosted a forum at the IOP.

Despite Whitman’s divide from the far-right wing of the Republican party, she noted that she refuses to leave it, instead saying “I want to fight for it, I want to fight for the party in which I’ve been, in which I grew up, that was a centrist party, that was an umbrella party that embraced people.” Part of this, she said, is about avoiding litmus tests.

In the Republican party that existed when she worked for Rockefeller’s campaign, Whitman noted that “you could disagree on abortion and still be a Republican. It was not a litmus test issue and we should get away from those.”

She went on to note that “the majority of the American people self-identify as moderates, they might not agree on every issue but they’re basically in the same park.”

While Whitman declined to make an endorsement for the 2008 presidential election, she did mention her thoughts on some of the potential candidates.

“I really think that if Hillary Clinton decides to run that she’ll get the democratic nomination,” Whitman said, although she had cautionary words for Clinton’s possible rival, Barack Obama. “I like everything that I hear him say... but he’s got to be very careful because he’s very young and does not have much experience,” she said. “To project yourself to the presidency after two years in the United States Senate after having been a state senator is a real stretch and he could hurt himself badly.”

Whitman was more optimistic about the chances of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, noting that he “has a real chance of winning” traditionally blue states like New York and New Jersey. “If you look at the electoral map,” she said, “he could win in those states that are the most competitive with the biggest electoral votes. The problem is he couldn’t get the nomination from the Republican party...and that’s the challenge.”