With the New Hampshire primaries approaching, I thought I'd share
this article about how Hillary Clinton's political style has directly
affected New Hampshire voters in a way that might shed light on the kind of
president she would be. The post was co-written with Friends of the Earth
Action president Brent Blackwelder.
New Hampshire has for decades struggled to keep its air
clean. But during 2005 and 2006, Hillary Clinton's ambitions collided with
New
Hampshire's air quality, putting thousands of Granite Staters, and
particularly
children, directly in the line of a deadly cloud of toxic pollution.
At the time, of course, Clinton was hotly engaged in a campaign to increase
her margin of victory in her bid for reelection in her New
York Senate race. Her triumph was never in question: she faced only token
Republican opposition in a heavily Democratic state. But she was desperate
to
prove that she could win with a big margin in more conservative areas of
upstate New York so she could prove to Democrats that she would be viable in
similar conservative areas around the country during her presidential bid.
That understandable political aspiration came head to
head with New Hampshire children's health in 2005, when the International
Paper
logging company href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/03/26/burning_
issue/?page=full">href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/03/26/burning_
issue/?page=full">unveiled a proposal to burn tires at its Ticonderoga
paper mill in upstate New York on
the border with Vermont. Burning tires to power its operations would save IP
money on its electricity bills, but it came with a heavy price.
Burning tires href="http://www.lesspollution.org/pdf/Is_Burning_Tires_Safe.pdf">producesa>
massive quantities of mercury, benzene, and other cancer-causing poisons,
and
prevailing winds would carry those poisons into Vermont, New Hampshire, and
the
rest of New England. At the time, doctors and public health officials href="http://www.lesspollution.org/my_turn.html">warned
that even a very limited tire burn could cause permanent damage to New
Englanders' health, especially that of children, whose developing bodies are
especially vulnerable to exposure to toxic chemicals. According to the
American
Lung Association, exposure to burning tires can href="http://lungaction.org/ala_vt/alert-description.tcl?alert_id=3464841">cut
years off someone's life.
The dangers were so bad that Vermont's
Republican governor, Jim Douglas, took up the cause and launched lawsuits
and
an extended public campaign to persuade New York not to expose the residents
of
his state to these deadly risks.
Normally, it's likely that Vermont's efforts along with
those of New York environmentalists would succeed in stopping such an
outrageous plan. But IP had an ace up its sleeve in Hillary Clinton. The
logging
company's strategists knew that Clinton would do almost anything to win
votes
in upstate New York and so they resorted to an old polluter trick: they
threatened to close down the plant and fire the workers if they weren't
allowed
to burn the tires.
It was the kind of absurd claim that Clinton had been
exposed to hundreds of times in her political career, and she knew better.
But
even though she had put defending children's welfare at the core of her
political identity, even serving as chair of the Children's Defense Fund,
she
was willing to sacrifice that value on the altar of her political ambition.
Clinton could have just stayed silent - the permit to
allow the tire burn was a state issue. But she went out of her way to help
the
logging company, href="http://www.dcourage.com/Hillary%20Clinton%20Burning%20Tires%20Internat
ional%20Paper.pdf">actively
lobbying the state government to allow the tire burn to go ahead.
With Clinton's influence behind them, the logging company had the bipartisan
support it needed and New York State approved a two-week test tire burn, as
a
prelude to a permanent permit.
The test, however, was a disaster. The worst fears of
environmentalists were realized as the pollution from the burn vastly href="http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006611190369">
exceeded
even International Paper's extremely lax pollution permit - exposing
thousands
of New Hampshire children to poisonous chemicals. Public outrage forced New
York to shut down the test after just three days.
IP, of course, didn't shut down the plant and didn't lay
off any workers (indeed, this December, they completed an href="http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=645522&category
=BUSINESS&newsdate=12/8/2007">$11
million upgrade at the facility and are planning on adding 12 new
jobs at the plant).
But the episode did show that Hillary Clinton is willing
to sacrifice even her most cherished value - children's welfare - when she
sees
even the smallest political advantage in doing so. It's the kind of decision
we
fear she would make over and over in The White House. In a world where
children
need all the help they can get, we need someone who will stand up for them
even
when it's politically tough to do so, and Clinton just isn't meeting that
standard.