Andrew Sullivan on...

THE BUSH RANCH: Imagine, for a moment, that Al Gore was now president. Now stop shaking for a minute and think hard. If Gore had built a presidential ranch that was one storey high, got all its electricity from the sun, and was described by the New York Times as a “model of the yuppie modern ranch,” don’t you think it would become an emblem of his presidency? So why hasn’t it happened to Bush? Here’s the Times: “The first lady, Laura Bush, has overseen the planting of native Texas grasses. The house is environmentally correct, with a passive solar design, geothermal cooling and heating, a cistern to catch rainwater and purification tanks and filters so that water from the house can be recycled for use in irrigation.” Does Bush get any credit for this? Do his environmental critics – who have yet to find a substantive difference between Bush’s and Clinton’s environmental policies – acknowledge that Bush is an actual, living, breathing environmentalist? While Gore talked a good game, does he know anything about tending to thousands of acres of actual brush land the way W does? I point this out just to show how lazy the press is. You start with a picture of Bush as a gas-guzzling, arsenic-pushing tool of Big Oil, and you sure as heck try and avoid anything that might complicate this picture. Of course, Bush is partly to blame. Unlike most modern yuppie pols, he doesn’t see his private life as just another propaganda tool. But that doesn’t mean the press shouldn’t notice more. Memo to Rove: how about Bush inviting a couple of environmental journalists to his ranch to show off his energy conservation? How about linking it to a speech that stresses such values in order to help wean us off foreign sources of energy? There’s no need to do a Tom Friedman, but you really do need to tackle this anti-environmental smear that has so far stuck to you.