Ads Ask: What Would Reagan Do About the Environment?

by Nikki Gloudeman · 2010-04-06 14:02:00 UTC
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Few Presidents have been as exalted by their base as Ronald Reagan. So it's not surprising that Republicans for Environmental Protection have decided to use the Gipper in new ads to curry GOP support for eco-regulations.

The commercials, currently airing on the uber-conservative radio shows of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in New Hampshire markets, are making waves by claiming Reagan would support climate change policies today.

Could this actually be true?

In one way at least, Reagan was an environmental stalwart: Like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower before him, he was a Republican who believed in the value of conservation. The ads use a clip from a 1984 speech he gave to the National Geographic Society, in which he intoned: "What is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live." And that wasn't just talk; during his presidency, Reagan signed 38 bills that added more than 10.6 million acres to the National Wilderness System.

Yet in many more ways, Reagan was a model of the New Republican: environmental foe. As Grist writer Amanda Little points out, he aggressively issued oil and gas leases to major corporations, appointed "blatantly anti-environment" leaders to head the Department of the Interior and EPA, and drastically slashed the EPA's budget. And then there were was his iconic line, "If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all."

Because of this, it makes sense that some environmental groups are finding this particular brand of exaltation hard to stomach. My favorite zinger is courtesy of Clean Air Watch, which mused of the Republican group's ads, "They must believe, as author Gore Vidal put it, that we live in the United States of Amnesia."

But even if the ads don't entirely have truth on their side, they at least have shrewdness. Republicans for Environmental Protection must know they're not going to win converts—especially among the extreme Beck and Limbaugh crowds—by utilizing the words of conventional environmentalists. But arch-conservatives could very well listen to their heroic Gipper, who they themselves have reinvented more than once.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Nikki Gloudeman is a senior fellow at Mother Jones magazine where she writes about the environment and other topics.
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