2001 US press briefings
The James S. Brady Briefing Room
12:10 P.M. EST
MR. FLEISCHER: Good afternoon. I have two personnel announcements that I'll be making. Then we have a third personnel announcement -- we will have a special guest star to make that announcement.
My two announcements -- the President intends to nominate John E. Robson to be President of the Export-Import Bank. And the President intends to nominate Anna Maria Farias to be Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
I'd like to introduce Scott McClellan to make the third announcement.
MR. MCCLELLAN: The President intends to nominate Mark B. McClellan to be a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. McClellan is an attending physician at the Stanford University Health Services and the director of the program on health outcomes research at Stanford Medical School. He served at the Treasury Department from 1998 to 1999 as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy.
Originally from Austin, Texas, he is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin; received his Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University; received his MD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science and Technology; and earned his PhD in Economics from MIT. And he is also the father of my two and a half year old nieces, Ellie and Alex. (Laughter.)
Q Does he ever fight with you? (Laughter.)
MR. MCCLELLAN: We can talk about that later. (Laughter.)
Q Is this nepotism? (Laughter.)
MR. MCCLELLAN: Bipartisanship. (Laughter.)
MR. FLEISCHER: Brotherhood.
Q During the campaign, when he introduced Christine Todd Whitman to America as his nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency, the President promised to balance the competing interests of commerce and the environment. And yet we have seen a string of what environmentalists perceive as setbacks to their agenda. I'm wondering what the administration believes it is, in fact, balancing here, when environmentalists see no balance at all and he keeps lining up with industry on the questions of polluting.
MR. FLEISCHER: Let me remind you that the President has also taken actions on diesel fuel trucks which were hailed by the environmental community. The President's position on national monuments which were designated by the previous administration, leaving those national monument designations in place, has also been hailed by the environmental community. And the President is finding balance in his environmental policies and he is doing exactly what he said he would do as a candidate. And the President has gone beyond the proposals made by either President Clinton or Vice President Gore in calling for mandatory reductions of three pollutants under the Clean Air Act, so that we can reduce pollutants in the air. And those are sulphur dioxide, mercury, and the third nitrogen oxide, all of which goes beyond the pronouncements made by the previous administration.
Q Ari, with respect, there are some people who don't quite see it that way, and they were out there this morning, talking about some of the rollbacks in arsenic, his reversal on carbon dioxide. And I know your explanation on that, so I'm not asking for that again. But they said that the President came to town saying that he would change the climate in Washington; we didn't know that it was the actual climate that he was talking about. (Laughter.) And I'm wondering if the White House is concerned that they're giving the Democrats a very big stick with which to whack the President with between now and a year November.
MR. FLEISCHER: No, and I think you remember during the course of the campaign there was also some hyperbole on the side of those who oppose the President. And I think what you've heard this morning is a continuation of that partisan hyperbole. It happens in Washington.