The Stump Speech
Commentary: The president offers some straight talk on how to save our forests from the trees.
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The federal government can help.… But the government has got to do more than just spend money.… It seems like to me we ought to put a strategy in place to reduce the amount of money that we have to spend on an emergency basis by managing our forests in a better, more commonsensical way.… Thinning underbrush makes sense, makes sense to save our species, it makes sense—of animals—it makes sense to save the big stands of trees.… What I'm about to tell you is called a collaborative effort to do some commonsense things in our forests to protect them and protect the communities around the forests.
—From George W. Bush's remarks in Redmond, Oregon, on August 21, 2003, announcing his Healthy Forests initiative
The President: Thank you. Please be seated. Thank you. I'm glad to see a lot of cowboy hats in the audience. You know you're in a pretty good place in a red state when you see a lot of cowboy hats.…
[Pause.]
[TV newsperson: This is Marcie Chang with the president. While Mr. Bush stops for one of his trademark long pauses, I'll quickly sketch the scene here for the viewers. We're on a hillside in Oregon, a tree-infested state near California. As I look around, trees are literally everywhere, choking the landscape and providing a perfect backdrop for the president's theme today.The crowd who have come to hear the president are a whole rainbow under big Stetsons, faces in colors of pink and light pink and white and sunburn tan. The p— Oh, I see the president's lips have begun to twitch, indicating that the pause is about to end. Let's listen again.]
…And before I begin, I'd like to apologize to everybody, if I may, for being affiliated with the federal government in Washington, D.C. I am really sorry about that. Unfortunately, if you're president, that's where they make you work. Now, Washington, D.C., is thousands and thousands of miles on the other side of the country. Around our little old family compound in Cape Porpoise, Maine, that's what we call "a fur piece." And it's just plain everyday common horse sense that people way over there in Washington aren't going to know jack, as we used to say around the Skull and Bones society in New Haven, Connecticut.…
[Pause.]
[Marcie Chang: By the hint of a smile at the corner of the lips and the appreciative twinkle in the eye, this has all the signs of being one of the president's longer pauses. Conveniently, the White House support staff have provided a digital "Pause-O-Meter" on a tripod just to the right of the podium, and while it has a lot of time remaining on it, audience members are getting up and helping themselves to the Western-style barbecue buffet.
Since we do have a few minutes, I'd like to point out that the email address at the bottom of your screen will take prospective employers to a website with my career résumé. I'm looking for some other kind of job than this. Preferably in financial reporting or trading mutual funds after hours.
The audience have now resumed their seats, and the president's body language suggests he is once again ready to go.]
…No, they don't know jack about the problems of you good people way out here. See, I understand what it is to say you're a rancher, because I do it myself. Now, down in Crawford, Texas, where I say I'm from, it's pretty country, but it's not like up here. Down in Crawford, we don't have so many— what do you call 'em?—trees. But you know what else we don't have so many of? Forest fires. That's just commonsensical. Any schoolchild, except maybe one or two in Houston, Texas, can tell you that.
Now, when you fly in an airplane over this beautiful state of Oregon, you see sensibly managed forests everywhere you look, with the trees all cut logically down. And what you have left is a nice, smooth surface you could do lots of things with. But right next to the highways, where all the people drive, you've still got some trees for scenery and so on. Now, it doesn't take an Albert Einstein of forestry science to see that there's your problem right there. You have to thin those areas out, using the mother wit God gave you. Leave some tall trees standing for those folks that like to look at them, and let the other trees have the plainspoken average decency to get the heck out of the way.
See, here's what I mean by common sense. In Washington, D.C., the career bureaucrats and government employees get so caught up in rules and regulations and what the public wants that they forget to use their heads. Give you an example: tax cuts. When you cut taxes, who do you give the money back to? People who have plenty of it already! They'll put it safely with the rest of theirs, and know a lot better what to do with it. We're not talking rocket science here, folks, except of course over at NASA, and there probably won't turn out to be any money for NASA, so you don't have to worry about that. Same with cleaner air—if you want it, relax the regulations so companies can obey. How hard is that to figure out? All we're talking about is using perfectly ordinary smarts, just as simple and regular and self-explanatory as two plus two equals $87 billion for Iraq.
What I'm going to tell you now is why it's okay we're going to cut down the trees. Our wilderness areas are precious. That aside, what do they do? Ask yourself. You pay rent or mortgage for your property. But here we have big pieces of property that don't pay anything and are essentially getting a free ride, and that goes against the American concept of fair play. Our forests have got a job to do, just like a failed oil-business executive or a former baseball-team owner or a member of the board of Halliburton or anybody. And part of the job of those wilderness areas and forests is to have the trees in them thinned out (except maybe a few big stands, which do look pretty nice) to the extent of being removed or sawed down so they can usefully be sold for lumber or chop- sticks in Japan. And that makes every kind of sense—business sense, management sense, community sense, people sense, animal sense, and sense sense, if there is such a thing, as I truly believe that there is.
To conclude, I'd like to leave you with a final thought.…
[Pause.]
[Marcie Chang: Well, as you can see, the Pause-O-Meter is flashing all eights in the background; and from the look of deep self-enjoyment on the president's face, this prom-ises to be one of the pauses that seem to last for hours or even days. The distant noise you hear right now is a squad of chain saws firing up on the other side of the ridge as they prepare to remove the overburden of excess trees and forest-growth redundancy the president was speaking about. As exhaust smoke from the saws drifts across the gathering, many people are beginning to move toward the parking area, their ears still cocked toward the president in case any next words should emerge. On a personal note, I'd like to thank everybody who answered my employment solicitation during an earlier pause. I will read each email and reply to— Excuse me, it appears that the president has cut this pause unusually short, perhaps for dramatic effect or the element of surprise.]
…See, we've all heard that America's pub-lic lands and forests belong to the people. And that's true. But who are these people we're referring to? In some cases, they're also companies. That's the meaning of "incorporation," that little "Inc." at the end of a company's name. We sometimes forget that major firms like Weyerhaeuser or Boise Cascade or CSX Railroad or Plum Creek Timber are, legally speaking, individual entities just like you or me. Each American has a solemn responsibility to be a good steward of the people's lands, which makes us sort of like in-flight stewards on an airplane serving forests to skilled managers seated in first class who will know how to put those forests to work for everybody. We should be very proud to carry forward this responsibility today and continue the important public trust handed down to me by my dad. May God continue to bless us, and may he also bless some of you.
Illustration: Lara Tomlin
