What's the deal with Bruce Babbitt?

Great Debates
1

I saw him speak at GSU the other day, and he seemed to make sense, and it seems like he’s not a horrible guy, yet apparantly, he is?

http://www.savethepeaks.org/babbittwatch/

Is there another side to this story? Someone asked Mr. Babbitt about it the other night and got thrown out of the auditorium (needless to say, he was attempting to start a ruckus). Does anyone here know the deal with this, or is Babbitt just a regular old politician who says one thing and does another?

2

Well, he seems to be generally regarded as a committed environmentalist, and he’s written recently in favor of dam removal, which is a pretty standard enviro topic.

But he is definitely a “mainstream” environmentalist, and some people consider him (and “mainstream” environmentalism in general) basically just a front guy for corporate resource exploitation. Bear in mind that Alexander Cockburn, the author of one of the quotes in your link, also thinks that the Sierra Club and Al Gore are too wimpy and corporate-loving on environmental issues.

I don’t know if Babbitt really is a corporate shill or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he turned out to be an honest moderate who is simply too moderate and compromise-minded for the more radical (or more principled, however you like to call it) environmental-defense crowd.

3

Bruce Babbitt is also a former governor of Arizona. Here is a more balanced view of him.

4

Babbitt also presided over the Dep’t of the Interior when it was getting slammed for mismanagement of American Indian funds held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Well, it still is.) The problems existed much earlier than Babbitt’s incumbency, but he was ordered to fix them, and he failed. (It’s an open question whether they’re fixable; some familiar with the situation say that the fund was so badly managed and maintained, and the records treated so carelessly, over decades that it’s impossible to track where the money should go.)

That’s not exactly Babbitt’s fault, but it’s no shining star on his resume.

–Cliffy

5

Oh, and just as a counterweight to people like Alexander Cockburn complaining that Babbitt is a corporate-shill greenwashed environmental fraud, here you have a ranchers’ “land-rights” organization complaining (in the late '90s) that Babbitt is a radical eco-freak waging an anti-landowner “War on the West”.

Nothing like a balanced viewpoint, eh?

6

It’s the Cobell case. What a mess all around.