Paul Gigot in today's WSJ:
opinionjournal.com
POTOMAC WATCH
Energy War: A Tale of Two Strategies
Bush looks to Gray Davis to find out what not to do.
BY PAUL A. GIGOT
Friday, May 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
The mistakes of another chief executive are haunting President Bush as he tries to sell his energy plan. No, not Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Bush's non-role model is Gray Davis, the formerly popular Democratic governor of California.
Like the president, Gov. Davis inherited an energy crisis that wasn't his fault. But his management of the problem has sent his once-soaring approval ratings into the dumper. So Mr. Bush and his advisers have decided to gamble on what amounts to the polar opposite of the Davis strategy. It should make a fascinating study in comparative politics.
Mr. Davis tried to husband his popularity by avoiding the problem as long as he could. A year ago he could have junked the state's failed regulation policy, signed some long-term energy contracts and allowed prices to rise. "He just did not want to take a risk, which is his motif," says Dan Walters, the esteemed columnist for the Sacramento Bee, and so things only got worse.
The governor finally attacked the shortfall with a series of short-term fixes. He endorsed price caps, to shield consumers from higher prices but at the cost of limiting supply incentives. He's also used general revenues to buy energy, again as a quick fix but at the cost of squandering the state's budget surplus. Only recently has he stressed longer-term supply.
As for political rhetoric, Mr. Davis has followed the Bill Clinton pattern and by turns blamed just about everybody else for the problem--his GOP predecessor (with cause), Republicans in general, the Democratic Legislature, Big Energy outside California, Big Utilities inside (with profits so "excessive" one is now bankrupt) and of course the feds.
This week he migrated east with an op-ed in the Washington Post assailing the profits of "generators and marketers, almost all of them in the South and many of them located in"--drum roll, please--"Texas"!
The Bush strategy couldn't be more different. From the first the president embraced what he himself labeled a "crisis," even before most Americans felt any pain. He thus took political responsibility for the problem by saying he'd solve it.
Yet the president's plan proposes very little in the way of short-term fixes, much to his own party's dismay. (Congress defines short-term as the next recess.) Mr. Bush won't grant Mr. Davis's request to impose price caps, despite the immediate political boost he'd get in California. He won't even cut the 18.5-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax, a GOP perennial.
The plan isn't without political eyewash, to be sure. Mr. Bush offers more subsidies for alternative fuels (think ethanol), though his own report says that by 2020 such sources will provide just 2.8% of U.S. electricity. He also turns up the mood music about "conservation" a little too loudly to be credible. But most of his proposals are the boring stuff of supply, demand and deregulation and won't pay off for years. Many are also unpopular (such as Arctic drilling).
As for blame, Mr. Bush has once or twice knocked around the Clinton White House for neglect. But for the most part he's blamed no one. Even his aides have held their tongues about Mr. Davis, though I have tried to goad them. Mr. Bush's speech yesterday contained a plea for a "new tone in discussing energy and the environment, one that is less suspicious, less punitive, less rancorous."
This turn-the-other-cheek politics is risky, especially since Democrats are throwing everything they have at Mr. Bush. When he visits Pennsylvania today, the Sierra Club will welcome him with newspaper ads featuring a Three Mile Island smokestack. And that's the subtle stuff. "GOP seems to stand for gas, oil and plutonium," says Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, in a typical line.
Many Republicans, including several in the White House, want Mr. Bush to return this populist fire. They suggest he take a page from the 1970s and rip his opponents as granola-eating elites who want to take away the average soccer mom's microwave and SUV. In short, they want him to act like Mr. Davis.
But Mr. Bush has refused. He privately says the strategy doesn't fit his desire to "change the tone" inside the Beltway. He also thinks voters will credit him first for leadership and later for results. For better or worse, this is the same strategy he's taken toward Social Security.
And maybe he's right. Passing the buck sure hasn't worked for Mr. Davis. The governor's approval rating, well above 60% in February, is now sinking below 50% and his "re-elect" number is heading toward 30%. And this is before price hikes and blackouts hit consumers this summer. "His presidential chances are obviously gone," says Mr. Walters, the Sacramento columnist.
I recently heard a Journal reporter ask Vice President Dick Cheney if Mr. Bush and GOP would suffer politically in 2002 for this long-term strategy. His reply was instructive:
"That's what we get paid to do. . . . I would hope from the standpoint of the country they will say right on, these guys are working hard, we'll agree with some proposals and disagree with other proposals and this is what we expect our president to be doing."
This may or may not be smart politics. But it is refreshing. |
