The moderate who wasn't there

How, at this late date, shall we identify the elusive, yeti-like creature known as the moderate Republican? Whitman herself invites horselaughs whenever she cites fellow travelers on the great middle way. On the Republican side, she brightly offers Tom Ridge, whose blatant pimping of terror alerts whenever Bush's poll numbers looked too shaky helped turn the Department of Homeland Security into a reliable source of material for Jay Leno and David Letterman. On the Democratic side, even more astonishingly, Whitman tosses her bouquet to Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, whose foam-flecked rant before last year's GOP national convention had even case-hardened culture warriors calling for a tranquilizer rifle and a net.

In Whitman's case, success has been chiefly a matter of personal style and good timing. She caught incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley loafing through his 1990 reelection campaign and used her narrower-than-expected defeat to leverage influence. She won the keys to the governor's mansion in 1993 by playing (moderately) to a statewide anti-tax tantrum. When the GOP won control of the House in 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich picked her to deliver the response to President Clinton's State of the Union address. Even at a time when Gingrich and his minions were bellowing like puffed-up Genghis Khans, Gingrich was shrewd enough to know that Whitman's lower-key approach would play better on television. For the same reason, the party leadership picked Whitman to co-chair the 1996 national convention.

Whitman's appeal proved to have a rather short shelf life. In July 1997, National Review dubbed her the "Nowhere Girl" because of her wobbly record on the GOP's red-meat social and economic issues. She only narrowly staved off a reelection challenge from a blandly likable Democrat named Jim McGreevey. She infuriated New Jersey Republicans by retracting a Senate bid in late 1999. When Whitman accepted Bush's offer to come to Washington and handle smoke and mirrors for him at the Environmental Protection Agency, the air quickly became thick with the smell of burned bridges.

The truth of the matter is that Whitman is hardly a standard-bearer for any kind of moderation. Her much-touted tax cuts were largely achieved by slashing state aid to municipalities, pushing costs downward and local property taxes upward, and by shorting the pension fund for state workers to the tune of $2.5 billion in contributions, eventually floating bonds to cover the shortfall. Her penchant for outdoor recreation belied her open-for-business attitude toward environmental regulation, leaving the state Department of Environmental Protection understaffed and demoralized (which would also be the case at the EPA). Her pro-choice orientation is hardly a badge of courage in New Jersey; in fact, it's pretty much a prerequisite for anyone seeking the governorship. It has also proved negotiable at crucial points. When two pro-choice Republican governors, William Weld of Massachusetts and Pete Wilson of California, demanded a chance to present their views at the national convention, Whitman let the party freeze them out. George W. Bush has famously credited his political success to being "misunderestimated" by his opponents; Whitman has spent her career being misoverestimated by her supporters.

Part of what makes "It's My Party, Too" so tedious is that what should have been Whitman's best stuff -- the near-miss gubernatorial campaign that briefly made her a Republican star, and how Bush sawed her off at the knees at the EPA over global warming -- has already been told (with extra-large helpings of insider dirt) by GOP consultant Ed Rollins in his 1996 memoir, "Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms," and by journalist Ron Suskind in last year's "The Price of Loyalty." Whitman takes a decorous jab at Rollins and offers a weak gloss of the EPA fiasco, in which she announced Bush's support for the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, only to have Bush reject the protocol and leave her twisting in the wind. But for the most part she is proud to announce that "It's My Party, Too" is not a tell-all book.

A "tell-all" book is one thing; a "tell nothing" book is quite another, though in Whitman's case it's understandable that she would want to gloss over a few things. A great many people would like to know why Whitman, heading the EPA in the days and weeks following 9/11, repeatedly assured New Yorkers that the toxin-laden air of Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. Whitman, understandably, doesn't go near that one in "It's My Party, Too," though she does describe in great detail how she came to present the Bush family with Scottie pups. The story of how she helped present the rescue workers of ground zero with lasting health problems will have to be told, I suspect, with the help of subpoenas and lawsuits rather than ghostwriters.

We will also have to wait for another book, I suppose, to get the inside story of how Whitman did her part to beautify the New Jersey approach to Philadelphia during preparations for the Republican National Convention in 2000. The main avenue to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge was Admiral Wilson Boulevard, a Brechtian hell's highway of go-go bars, liquor stores and hot-sheets hotels. Whitman spent some $45 million to bulldoze everything along the boulevard and replace it with a "park" that succeeded in making Camden look even more desolate. She also eliminated, along with the sleaze merchants, a good number of Camden's few remaining legitimate businesses. It does make one smile while reading her chapter on "Reclaiming Lincoln's Legacy" through minority outreach.

Since flunking out of the Bush League, Whitman has been relegated to the bush leagues, and she's clearly impatient to become a player again. Ultimately, the most pressing question in "It's My Party, Too" is: Does Christie Whitman still have a place in the Republican Party? The answer: Sure, as long as she's ready to keep playing the role of a front. And if she is, we can already guess the title of her next book: "Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?" And the subtitle: "I Spent Years Sucking Up to Fundies and Ideological Con Men and All I Got Was This Stupid Book Deal." Who knows -- if Whitman releases some of the pent-up patrician rage coiled beneath the Oldwick tweed, that book might actually be worth reading. Which would put it miles ahead of this one.

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