On Earth Day, Bush Plugs Environmental Policies

By Don Gonyea

Published April 22, 2005 at 12:00 AM EDT

President Bush marks Earth Day with a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains -- America's most-visited national park and one of its most polluted. The president will use the park as a backdrop for promoting policies he says will result in cleaner air and water. Environmentalists say he is actually weakening regulations.

Corrected: April 23, 2005 at 11:19 AM EDT

President Bush canceled his Earth Day visit to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park because of bad weather.

Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.

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