Bush’s Approach Well-Illustrated in Energy Policy BY RONALD BROWNSTEIN

It’s far too early to say whether the plan that President Bush released last week will provide the path out of the energy crunch. But it unquestionably provides a road map for the way this White House approaches a complex political problem. It helps explain why Bush is proving a more formidable adversary than many Democrats had expected--and why his reach may still exceed his grasp.

The report’s release demonstrated again that Bush doesn’t suffer from the common conservative compulsion to pick fights with the public over abstract matters of doctrine--especially doctrines that most Americans resist. Bush may pursue smaller government, but he never describes government as “the problem” the way President Reagan did. His education agenda leans right, but he never projects hostility toward public schools.

On energy, he followed the same pattern. Leading into the report’s release, Vice President Dick Cheney seemed spoiling for an ideological showdown over conservation, which he dismissed as “a sign of personal virtue,” not “a sufficient basis” for national policy. Bush wasn’t about to give Democrats such a tempting target: In his speech releasing the plan, the president insisted that his strategy “begins” with conservation.

Likewise, for weeks, Cheney has seemed to revel in California’s suffering, as if it were appropriate punishment for excessive concern about the environment. In his speech, Bush conspicuously praised California’s conservation efforts--only to conclude, almost sadly, that the state’s experience merely proved his point that conservation is not enough.

This may be an orchestrated good-cop, bad-cop routine. Or it may be, as Democratic pollster Mark Mellman says, that Bush simply had the luxury of speaking after he could gauge the (overwhelmingly negative) reaction to Cheney’s remarks.

But it seems also to reflect a deeper generational change that Bush is bringing to the GOP. For all the moderation of his personal manner, Cheney was shaped by the hard-edged style of House Republicans during the 1980s. As a permanent and impotent minority, the House GOP had to speak shrilly to be heard at all--and viewed itself as forever under siege. Cheney’s belligerent comments about conservation reflected that us-and-them way of looking at the world.

Shaped in an era when Republicans have been less embattled, Bush is more absorptive; he tends less to dismiss his opponent’s ideas than to find ways of incorporating them into his own arguments. Sometimes the embrace is mostly rhetorical: Bush’s tax plan praised working-class waitress moms far more than it helped them. But on other issues, Bush gives ground to gain his larger objectives. To advance his education plan, he’s accepted more federal spending (if not as much as Democrats prefer).

Again, the energy plan repeats the pattern. Bush puts his biggest chips on new production and regulatory relief for energy companies. But he also offers enough incentives for energy efficiency that Democrats can’t plausibly accuse him of ignoring conservation.

The White House made the plan tougher to attack with a second calculation. Rather than staking out unequivocal positions on such headline-grabbing questions as authorizing more drilling on public lands or relaxing pollution requirements for refineries, the report instead directs that Cabinet departments and federal agencies make those decisions later on. Of the report’s 105 recommendations, fully 73 are such directives to executive agencies; just 20 proposals must go through Congress.

This reliance on deferred executive action offers another key to Bush’s thinking--in this case, his determination to shift political battles onto the terrain most favorable for him.

In one sense, this executive-branch strategy is a backhanded acknowledgment that on choices pitting energy against the environment, Bush faces tough odds in Congress. Even in the House, which has backed Bush’s other priorities with remarkable party discipline, “it’s probably weighted a little bit against us on energy,” says one top GOP aide. The problem is that there are more suburban Republicans worried about offending environmentalists than there are oil-state Democrats open to producer arguments. Today, Bush probably lacks the votes in either chamber to approve drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--one of the report’s key legislative proposals.

Relying wherever possible on executive branch action tilts the scales back in Bush’s direction. It makes it tougher for critics to focus public attention on the changes. The press will blanket the Capitol Hill food fights over the pieces of the plan that Congress can chew on. But don’t bet on the networks sending cameras every time the Interior Department publishes an agate type notice in the Federal Register inviting oil companies to poke new wells into a Colorado hillside.

An executive-branch strategy also forces critics to contest more fronts at once, as those 73 agency directives advance. It prevents opponents from mobilizing for one decisive battle to block Bush’s agenda. Perhaps most important, it guarantees that Bush will be fighting in arenas where he’s picked the referees; after all, it’s his Cabinet and regulatory officials, many of them industry alumni, who will be making the final decisions. The report carefully avoids suggesting that the White House is dictating the outcomes as agencies review issues such as streamlining licensing requirements for nuclear power plants. But administration officials are unlikely to miss the hint: Bush appointees “know which way the wind is blowing,” says John Podesta, President Clinton’s White House chief of staff, “and it ain’t toward windmills.”

Yet even this executive option doesn’t guarantee Bush success. It leaves his initiatives more vulnerable to court challenges from environmentalists. And the eruption this spring over the repeal of Clinton’s rule on arsenic in drinking water shows that overreaching regulatory decisions can burn the White House as badly as legislative fights. Public opinion has a way of making itself felt--no matter where the decisions are being made.

And the fact remains that for all the tactical skill evident in its construction, Bush’s plan is still pressing the boundaries of public tolerance on the balance between energy and the environment, or reliance on big energy companies to serve the public interest. Public skepticism remains the big cloud over the vista of proliferating power plants and oil derricks that Bush painted in his energy wish list.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.