10/20/00 8:45 a.m.
What About Al’s Book?
Michigan Republicans focus on Gore’s environmental tract.

By Henry Payne, editorial cartoonist and a writer for the Detroit News
& Diane Katz, editorial writer with the News

l Gore doesn't like these SUVs driving around on our streets; he doesn't like all these vehicles that are generating all the profit-sharing that auto workers have been enjoying," Michigan Gov. John Engler tells Detroit Free Press columnist Hugh McDiarmid. "If I were running against Al Gore, I would go from door to door and tell people about his book," says Michigan Rep. Randy Richardson, R-Monroe.

"If you're thumbing through [Earth in the Balance] in the bookstore, look up page 366," Detroit radio talk-show host David Newman advises his listeners. "It's a total nightmare," responds his guest, Pat Harrison, co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

In this battleground state, as across the Midwest, The Book is regarded by Republicans, businesspeople, and conservative pundits alike as the ultimate weapon against a Gore victory on November 7. Why, then, has George W. Bush neglected to deploy it?

This is a matter of keen speculation among his supporters — many of whom are increasingly frustrated by such an apparent waste of political opportunity. When Bush whiffed on Jim Lehrer's softball question about The Book in Wednesday's debate, you could hear Republicans from Detroit to Grand Rapids screaming at their television sets. Earth in the Balance, after all, lays out Gore's radical regulatory solution to the ecological "holocaust" he says is being perpetrated in large part by the auto industry. Surely this is relevant to the millions of voters whose livelihoods depend on the industry's products.

Convinced there is a rational explanation — desperate, in fact, to believe so — Republican activists here are swapping theories instead of hellos. Among them: Pressing the issue would invite attack of Bush's environmental record in smog-prone Texas, despite recent improvements in air quality there; or, the governor's ties to "Big Oil" leave him too vulnerable to take the offensive; or that independent voters frown on negative attacks.

Bush supporters have good reason to think Earth in the Balance could be problematic for Gore. An internal Gore campaign memo from 1992 flagged The Book as a major Gore liability. Gore's staff noted that "he has no sense of proportion. He equates the failure to recycle aluminum cans with the Holocaust — an equation that parodies the former and dishonors the latter."

Indeed, voters in a Detroit News focus group were alarmed when presented with passages from The Book. "If he really believes that, he's nuts," said one independent from Macomb County, echoing the view of others in the room. The media, its leftist slant showing, is complicit in deflecting attention from Gore's wacky convictions by treating Earth in the Balance as irrelevant — his recent reiterations notwithstanding. But not many Americans, politicians least of all, actually believe that the family minivan "poses a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront."

But were Bush to have penned a best-seller about, say, religion being "the central organizing principle of mankind" (Gore's words about global warming) there's no doubt the press would take up the subject. Nor are Gore's unconventional notions merely intellectual calisthenics. The vice president, in the last eight years, has translated his environmental vision into a slew of costly regulations that defy both science and common sense. There's no shortage of evidence that he's not kidding about his "strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine."

Surely, Bush's Michigan supporters say, such a goal warranted prominent mention at the Republican convention. But Bush was silent about Gore's environmental extremism as detailed in the book. When Midwest gasoline prices soared — along with consumer pique — the time also seemed ripe to expose Gore's support for demand-dampening energy taxes. But not a word from Bush on that front.

Expectations rose again last month after Bush chose an auto-parts plant in Saginaw, Mich., to unveil his energy policy. Surely he would introduce autoworkers to Gore's disdain of automobility. Bush instead spent his time in Michigan talking about…Alaskan oil reserves.

Nor did Bush take advantage of the first nationally televised debate to send 50 million American jaws dropping with Gore's own words. Dick Cheney likewise failed to mention the book in his debate with Joe Lieberman. But when Bush again retreated after moderator Jim Lehrer encouraged the governor to address Earth in the Balance during Wednesday's debate, a dreadful realization started to dawn: Bush has no intention of capitalizing on Gore's green extremism.

"It's up to us, his lieutenants, to raise the issue," says Michigan Rep. Joe Knollenberg. And, yet in the absence of discussion from the top of the Republican ticket, most voters are entirely unaware of what Gore actually believes. On a recent swing through Monroe County, home to numerous auto plants, not one of some two dozen people we spoke with was aware of the vice president's views. When Knollenberg raises the issue while campaigning here for Bush, he's routinely asked, "Why isn't anybody talking about this?"

Appearing recently on Newman's radio show, The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol marveled at how, on his visits to Michigan, he found few voters with any idea of Gore's contempt for the state's leading industry.

In a 1994 analysis of Earth in the Balance, John Lott wrote: "One of the many remarkable facts about the 1992 presidential election was the complete absence of hard news stories on Albert Gore's book Earth in the Balance." In 2000, George Bush seems determined to repeat the past.