Bush Backer Says He’s Through With Ads

Sam Wyly, the Dallas financier who underwrote a last-minute advertising blitz that benefited Texas Gov. George W. Bush just before last month’s decisive primaries, said Tuesday he would stay off the air in the general election contest.

“Many of you are aware of my recent foray into presidential politics,” Wyly told an audience at the Climate Institute in Seattle. “I have already decided it is to be my last.”

Wyly and his brother Charles, two major contributors to Bush, formed an organization called Republicans for Clean Air and paid about $2.5 million to create and air the spots. Broadcast in California, New York and Ohio, the commercials blasted the environmental record of Bush’s rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

The ad campaign drew outrage from McCain and focused attention on the increasingly controversial role of such privately financed advocacy groups, which can operate without disclosing their donors to the Federal Election Commission so long as their spots don’t use the words “vote for” or “vote against.”

Wyly said the ads failed to publicize his message promoting cleaner coal-burning power plants and competition in the electric utility industry--both of which would benefit his company, GreenMountain.com.

“I thought I had a clever idea to get America to focus on the clean-air issue and to help my presidential candidate,” Wyly said.

But Wyly’s announcement also comes as some environmentalists, angry over the ads and the Texas investor’s public critique of Vice President Al Gore, were threatening to launch a boycott of his company, which markets electricity from renewable sources such as solar power.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that had planned the boycott, said he would call it off.

Wyly “was associating environmental regulation with something draconian and bad,” Cook said.

A person familiar with Wyly’s thinking said: “He wanted to create some noise about clean air in the Republican Party. It didn’t work. It got focused on McCain. He realizes it didn’t come out the way he wanted.”

Wyly noted his break from some environmentalists in his remarks Tuesday. “I know from time to time many of us may disagree on our politics, our candidates and our methods,” he said, “but what I do know is that everyone in this room is committed to cleaner air through cleaner energy.”