Gulf Oil: Another Compromise Loss For Bush

You know things in Washington are grinding to a halt for George W. Bush when he's got to make a hard-fought compromise with his own brother.

"Floridians have spoken loud and clear, and their voices have been heard by President Bush," Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Monday after Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced the administration would ask Congress to let oil companies drill on about 1.5 million more acres in the Gulf of Mexico. That's just a quarter of the roughly 6 million acres that the Clinton administration first proposed opening for leasing in 1997 and that the Bush/Cheney energy plan had earmarked for drilling.

Speaking from his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Gov. Bush called the scaled-back proposal a victory for "Florida's fight to protect our coastline" and told Bush the words he's going to be hearing a lot for the next few years: not in my back yard. "Any lease sales that do occur in the 181 area" — a patch of energy-rich ground in the derrick-free eastern part of the gulf — "will occur off the coast of Alabama, not Florida," he said.

The newly proposed area extends to 100 miles south of Mobile and gets no closer than about 200 miles west of Tampa. That's actually OK with the folks in Alabama — they already have plenty of drilling platforms out there, as does most of the Gulf coastline stretching west to Texas. And now it's OK with the folks — the Republicans, anyway — in Florida, who are worried about their white sandy beaches and the mammoth tourism industry that grows on them.

The compromise was made (and somehow you don't expect Norton to be overruled later in the week) to appease the state GOPers whom Bush offended late last month when he came to Florida to strike an environmental pose at the Everglades National Park with a bunch of Democrats. It may even break the supply-side stranglehold Florida put on the House when it engineered a 247 to 164 vote last month to bar exploration in the eastern gulf until April.

With compromises like these…

Not that everybody's happy — not even close. Most environmental groups would prefer not to drill at all, and Florida Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson, quickly dubbed the plan "the proverbial camel's nose under the tent." (Norton did say the plan would call for a reconsideration of its limits in six years.) And the energy industry and its friends in Congress are just plain appalled at Bush's lack of backbone.

"By caving into Nimbyism in Florida, the Bush administration has decimated its own energy plan," said Rep. David Vitter, (R-La.) "I think this really just shuts down the opportunity to do anything productive to reduce our dependence on foreign oil." Oil companies are particularly disappointed to lose a "stovepipe" portion of the area that extended straight up toward Mobile and the tip of the Florida panhandle, thought to contain rich natural-gas deposits in shallow water.

For its trouble, the White House gets to offer energy producers about 44 percent of the oil deposits and 47 percent of the natural gas deposits that the larger site had, on one-fourth the acreage. Enough natural gas, said Norton, to serve one million American families for 15 years, and enough oil to power the cars of one million families for nearly six years.

So who wins?

The plan allows Ari Fleischer to say the president's new plan is "environmentally sensitive and balanced" (although that's what they said about the old plan). It allows Jeb Bush, up for a tough re-election in 2002, to imagine that his brother's winning the presidency was actually a good thing for him politically.

And it puts the president even further back on his heels. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday, Bush's eroding approval rating is down to 52 percent, and support for his energy plan is nowhere near that high. A comfortable majority of Americans still believe Bush cares more about exploration than the environment and more about his energy-industry contributors than his average American constituent.

Bill Clinton had the foresight to call this sort of presidential crippling the "Third Way" and thus make it seem like at least some of the rampant legislative triangulation of his first term was his idea. Bush used to talk about "compassionate conservatism" while he was calling the shots — now that Jim Jeffords is gone, Bush has shrunk into just one Republican part of the third leg of the right-left-center negotiating triangle.

Once upon a time, to the approbation of the masses, Bush to promised to bring compromise in Washington, and lo and behold — here it is. But until he starts cutting some of these deals ahead of time, and cutting back on those "Bush Scales Back…" headlines, Americas are eventually going to get the idea that these "balanced" compromises are happening against Bush's will.

Which will make it a little hard for him to get any credit for them.

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