GOP Leaders Warn Bush of Backlash From Power Crisis

Fearful of a political backlash, some leading California Republicans are urging incoming President George W. Bush to more aggressively intervene in the state’s deepening energy crisis.

One day after Bush insisted the problem must be solved primarily at the state level, several prominent GOP strategists said the new president’s hands-off posture could send a dangerous signal to the nation’s most populous state--and expose him to attacks from California Democrats led by Gov. Gray Davis.

Bush “can’t just walk away from it,” said veteran California GOP strategist Kenneth L. Khachigian. “My political advice to the incoming administration is, there’s a guy out here, Davis, who is very nimble politically, and that very quickly the blame for the problem can start being shifted to Washington, whether fairly or not. So I do think it has to be a very serious priority agenda item for the Bush administration.”

Indeed, strategists in both parties believe Bush’s response could determine whether he can establish a beachhead in California, which gave a commanding majority to Al Gore last November despite a multimillion-dollar television ad blitz by the GOP.

“There are two risks for Bush,” said Democratic consultant Bill Carrick. “One is being seen as being passive and inattentive to California. The other risk, an even harsher judgment, is that he is going to be seen as standing with his Texas energy industry buddies against the state of California and California consumers.”

The competing danger for Bush is the risk of disappointing his supporters in the California business community, especially the high-tech industry in the Silicon Valley, whose profits fall every time the lights go out and the production lines stop.

For Bush, these risks are intensified by the accident of timing: With the crisis boiling over (or perhaps blacking out) precisely at the moment he enters office, his response will be the first impression many Californians form of his presidency. “This is really the moment for George Bush in terms of creating a perception among Californians,” said Mark Baldassare, a pollster at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “The issue for Californians is they are going to be contrasting the words and actions of George W. Bush against the eight years of special handling by Bill Clinton.”

Yet launching a major initiative on the California utility crisis during his first days as president would violate one of Bush’s major political precepts. As governor in Texas, Bush was ruthless in focusing on his own agenda and resisting demands to become entangled in other issues.

For his first week as president, Bush has been planning to highlight his education agenda, and aides appear reluctant to overshadow that message with a significant intervention in the California crisis.

One senior Bush advisor said late Friday that the incoming administration was examining its options but had not yet reached a consensus about how much the federal government could do to help the state. Like Bush a day earlier, the advisor argued that solutions would have to come mostly from California itself.

“Davis has to grapple with it primarily,” the advisor said. “There may be federal things we can and should do. We need to understand them and have a full awareness of them. . . . But this is fundamentally a supply question; it is a problem that has been created by California.”

Sending a Message

So far, in his public comments, Bush has offered two principal reactions to the crisis. One has been to emphatically reject Davis’ call for federal caps on the prices that energy wholesalers charge to utilities, not only in California but across the West.

Bush’s second argument has been that the crisis proves his point that environmental restrictions must be loosened, both to increase production of oil and gas and also to enable power companies to more easily build new generating plants. Bush has also suggested that Washington and Sacramento might need to “relax” environmental regulations to allow existing power plants to operate at a higher capacity.

On Friday, the senior advisor reiterated that the new administration believes California’s “rules and restrictions” have exacerbated the problem. “Unless they engage in a greater range of motion, for example, on environmental questions and siting questions and pollution credit trading,” it will be impossible to solve the problem, the official argued.

Several GOP strategists said they believe the crisis will make Californians more receptive to Bush’s message that a long-term solution requires a new balance between environmental protection and energy production--a conclusion Democrats intensely dispute.

Where the two sides agree is that the absence of a short-term response from Bush could deepen his political challenge in a state that he lost by nearly 1.3 million votes last November.

John J. Pitney Jr., associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a former deputy research director at the Republican National Committee, said Friday that the president-elect’s flat refusal to consider price caps “probably will be harmful to Bush and the Republicans in California, if California’s energy problems persist.”

“If I had been writing Bush’s talking points, I would have added a couple of layers of sympathy,” Pitney said in a phone interview from Claremont, where the lights were off because the school has agreed to go off-line when electrical demand is high.

“If the state can manage to reduce the inconvenience considerably, then people probably aren’t going to be thinking that much about energy in the fall of 2002. But if the problem goes on, that’s exactly the kind of remarks that Democratic opposition researchers live for.”

Dan Schnur, a San Francisco-based GOP consultant, said the Bush team must be conscious that prominent California Democrats, such as Davis and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are far more likely to point a finger of blame at Washington, now that Clinton is leaving office.

“Davis has been looking for a scapegoat from Day 1, and it’s a lot easier to point his finger at a Republican president than a Democrat,” argued Schnur, who was the communications director for Sen. John McCain’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination. “So even if the federal role is limited, Davis and Feinstein and other state Democrats are going to try to lay the problem at Bush’s doorstep.”

Remarks Will Be in Opponents’ Files

Already, Bob Mulholland, an acerbic consultant to the California Democratic Party, has said Bush and the GOP could be haunted for months by Bush’s comments in a series of media interviews Thursday, which generated headlines suggesting he was washing his hands of the problem.

“Every Republican candidate in 2002 may be running like cockroaches caught in the kitchen lights if this is [still] an issue,” Mulholland insisted. “Those headlines will be in our files for the next several years.”

Most Republican representatives from California echoed Bush’s insistence that Davis--a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2004--must bear primary responsibility for the mess. But some Republicans part company with Bush by also calling for substantial federal action.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) is circulating a letter among his colleagues, supporting Davis’ call for temporary caps on wholesale electricity prices in the West. Asked about Bush’s opposition to that idea, Hunter said: “We’ll have to keep working. We’ve got to show them the severity of the problem.”

On Friday, conservative Reps. George Radanovich (R-Mariposa) and Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego) joined Hunter in backing legislation to empower the energy secretary to impose temporary price caps.

“The state must take responsibility for its failure to generate its own electricity, coupled with its abysmal attempt at deregulation,” Cunningham said in a statement. “However, we are kidding ourselves if we believe that this crisis will stop at the California border. The federal government cannot ignore these warning signals.”