overnor George W. Bush raised eyebrows yesterday with a frontal assault on one of Vice President Gore's most cherished issues: the environment. Speaking at a revitalized industrial site in Pennsylvania, Bush outlined a plan for accelerating the cleanup and redevelopment of such "brownfields" around the country by increasing regulatory flexibility and easing up on draconian liability standards that discourage developers from investing in brownfields. Bush contrasted the success of several state-level brownfield initiatives with the utter failure of the federal Superfund program (which the vice-president takes credit for getting enacted into law). Under Superfund, industrial-site cleanups are long and costly. Cleaning up just one site can cost over $10 million, with a lion's share of the money going to pay for paperwork and legal fees. States, on the other hand, are cleaning more sites at a quicker pace. Bush and his fellow governors "didn't wait for Al Gore to wave his magic wand to clean up our environment. We cleaned it up ourself, and our state's the better for it."

Bush took a further swipe at the vice president by attacking Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, noting that the federal government remains the nation's worst polluter. Bush's speech was a welcome sign that his campaign will engage the vice president on environmental issues, rather than cede the turf as Republicans did in the last two Presidential campaigns.

Unfortunately, however, the Bush campaign still buys into the silly idea that voters should measure candidates’ commitment to environmental protection by their willingness to spend money. A fact sheet distributed Monday to rebut Democratic attacks on Bush's environmental record in Texas celebrates sharp increases in funding for natural resources and environmental regulation. The campaign website also supports greater funding for government land acquisition — anathema to property-rights advocates — even though governments at all levels still own four of every ten acres nationwide.

Republicans broke the Democratic party's monopoly on "compassion" in the debate over welfare reform by challenging the idea that a politician's commitment to helping the poor is measured by his willingness to spend tax money. Conservatives demonstrated that more money was not the answer to the problems of the underclass, and that true compassion was to be found in breaking the cycle of dependency fostered by the welfare state. One could oppose welfare programs without opposing the poor. Similarly, Republicans must show that one can oppose federal environmental programs without opposing environmental protection.

To capture the moral high ground in the environmental debate, Governor Bush needs to do more than challenge Gore's record on the environment and ridicule the inanities found in Earth in the Balance. He needs to challenge the premise underlying the vice president's commitment to central ecological planning by the EPA. The state initiatives Bush praised in his speech are successful precisely because they are run at the state level. Federal regulators cannot hope to match the states' performance, because central regulatory agencies have a difficult time using local knowledge to meet local needs. Successful reforms will decentralize environmental decision-making to the state and local level, not seek to remold the EPA. Bush's Pennsylvania speech was a good first step toward reclaiming the environmental issue. Let's hope he can stay this course.