Northwest Tactics Are a Balancing Act for Bush, Gore

A silky curtain of fog covered the Skykomish River as Willy O’Neil waited for George W. Bush to arrive at a rally here one brisk morning last week. Crystal clear, however, was O’Neil’s reasoning for backing Bush.

“We’ve just had too much top-down, ivory-tower environmental regulation,” complained O’Neil, an executive at an association of construction firms. “Until you get the local community to support you, top-down regulation just doesn’t work.”

O’Neil typifies the voters that Bush is targeting in an unconventional strategy to challenge Al Gore for Washington and Oregon--two states Democrats consider part of their electoral base. Far more aggressively than 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, Bush is championing the cause of Northwest logging, farming, fishing and mining industries. These are businesses that maintain they are being strangled by overzealous environmental regulations--and they fear that Gore would tighten the noose even further.

Bush’s promise of a lighter regulatory touch and greater local control in environmental decisions is helping him generate enthusiastic support in the rural parts of both states, particularly in the resource-dependent expanses east of the Cascade Range. But many analysts say his approach risks alienating environmentally conscious moderate voters in the Seattle and Portland, Ore., suburbs who might otherwise be receptive to his “compassionate conservatism.”

Bush’s strategy helps him “in stimulating turnout in the areas that are favorable to him,” said Bill Lunch, a political scientist at Oregon State University. “The difficulty is it hurts him in the areas that usually constitute the swing areas.”

Gore, meanwhile, faces his own balancing act on the region’s lengthy menu of environmental disputes.

On issues such as protecting the endangered salmon, Gore has tried to craft positions that won’t alienate mainstream voters, while minimizing defection to Green Party nominee Ralph Nader--whose embrace of the most purist environmental positions has won him a following in the Northwest probably greater than anywhere else.

Mainstream environmentalists line up behind Gore. But when he arrived for a late-night rally in Portland recently, the throng of Nader supporters heckling him was half as large as the crowd of Democrats who came to cheer.

These complex political dynamics have made Oregon and Washington two of the most unexpected and intriguing battlefields in campaign 2000. Both states, which have a combined 18 electoral votes, supported the Democratic presidential nominee in the last three elections. Yet the states remain somewhat unpredictable. President Clinton’s popularity with voters in Oregon dropped in 1996 while it increased nationally. And both states have displayed split personalities--each is represented in the Senate by a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican.

Bush’s campaign and the Republican National Committee already have blanketed Washington with more than $2.5 million in television ads and Oregon with nearly $850,000, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks campaign advertising.

Gore and the Democratic National Committee have exceeded the GOP buy in Oregon and nearly matched it in Washington.

As the buys suggest, Bush strategists are more optimistic about their prospects in Washington, hence the large investment there, than in Oregon. But new polls cast doubt on that assessment. Surveys showed Gore with a 7-percentage-point lead in Washington and just a 1-point advantage in Oregon, where Nader still is attracting 8% of the vote.

Local issues may influence the presidential race in the two states more than any other place in the country. When Bush and Gore come to the Northwest, they talk about salmon as much as they do about schools, timber as much as taxes. Both have been drawn into long-running environmental controversies that pit cities against the country, the east against the west and generate such strong emotion that one local observer calls them “our version of class warfare.”

The result has been a series of sharp distinctions concerning environmental topics that offer clear choices for voters. Here is a look at those issues.

* Dams: The region’s predominant environmental controversy centers on how to revive endangered salmon species. Environmentalists want to ease the salmon’s path upstream to spawn by breaching four federal dams on the Snake River; the idea is fiercely opposed by business and union interests, who say it will hurt shipping and irrigation and remove a source of cheap hydroelectric power.

The issue has taken on an emotional symbolism that extends beyond its considerable practical impact. “The dams may not be the only issue in eastern Washington, but they are an overwhelming issue there,” said Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.).

Bush has ruled out breaching the dams. Instead, he says, he would seek technological fixes to make them more accessible to salmon and provide money for voluntary local salmon restoration efforts.

Gore has sought a middle ground. He hasn’t ruled out eventually breaching the dams--”extinction here is not an option,” he says--but adds that he would pursue all other alternatives first. Bush accuses Gore of ducking the choice, but the vice president argues that his rival’s unequivocal stand amounts to prejudging the issue. Gore has pledged, if elected, to convene a “salmon summit” soon after taking office to search for a consensus plan.

* Timber: Since Clinton took office, tougher environmental regulation--spurred partly by worries about the endangered Northern spotted owl--has resulted in a 90% reduction in the annual timber harvest from the region’s public lands and a 10% to 15% drop on private lands, according to the Northwest Forestry Assn.

Bush has suggested he would increase harvests in national forests to about double their current level; he also has pledged to reverse a pending Clinton administration regulation that would bar building roads (and thus commercial logging) in 43 million acres of national forests. Gore has indicated he would expand the no-roads initiative to cover more acreage.

* Public lands: Gore has championed Clinton’s aggressive use of a 1906 law to set aside millions of acres across the West, including large tracts in Washington and Oregon, as national monuments generally off-limits to commercial activity.

During a recent swing through Oregon, GOP vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney suggested Bush would review--and possibly rescind some of--those decisions. And Bush, on his own visit here last week, subtly signaled skepticism about further designations by indicating that he would shift the focus of national park spending away from acquiring land toward increasing maintenance on existing properties.

For Bush, these sharp contrasts concerning environmental issues amount to one-half of a pincerlike strategy shaped heavily by advice from the region’s two Republican senators: Gorton and Oregon’s Gordon Smith.

As one side of the squeeze, Bush counts on his environmental stands to increase the GOP’s margin in traditionally conservative rural counties. Then he’s hoping that special circumstances in each state will hold down the Democratic vote in the moderate-to-liberal urban and suburban communities near the Pacific Coast.

In Washington, Republicans are betting that antagonism toward the federal antitrust suit against hometown high-tech goliath Microsoft Corp. will suppress the traditional Democratic advantage in and around Seattle. Bush has been circumspect in his comments about the case, which even private Democratic polls show is enormously unpopular here, but he hasn’t stopped Gorton from flatly telling audiences that a GOP Justice Department “would find a solution that would not involve breaking up the corporation.”

In Oregon, Bush is counting heavily on Nader to cut into the coastal Democratic vote.

Republicans are optimistic about the first half of the strategy: bumping up their rural vote. But these voters cast only about one-third of the ballots in each state, and the timber industry’s decline has reduced its electoral clout: It now provides only about one-quarter of manufacturing jobs in Oregon, one-eighth in Washington.

Thus, the decisive swing voters tend to be culturally tolerant, fiscally conservative suburbanites. Holding those voters--who covet green places for their weekend excursions--while promising a freer hand to the timber and agricultural industries represents the potential fault line in Bush’s pincerlike strategy.

Paul Berendt, the state Democratic Party chairman in Washington, said the surging high-tech economy has mitigated fears that environmental protection carried too high a cost in lost jobs. “Since the economy took off from 1995 forward, there’s been . . . a general feeling that growth is overcoming the [region] and we have got to act to preserve the quality of life. And Bush’s kind of politics are directly in contrast with that.”

Indeed, most analysts agree that, if Bush can’t avoid the label that he’d favor the chain saw over the backpack, his efforts in the Northwest are likely to turn to dust.