Columnist Jon Ralston: Few moves left in Yucca fight

Friday, April 5, 2002 | 4:59 a.m.

WHEN GOV. KENNY GUINN announces his veto on Monday of President Bush's designation of Yucca Mountain, it will be as if he has punched one of those chess clocks.

And as the timer starts ticking down from 90 days, the pieces arrayed on the nuclear industry's side of the Capitol Hill board will far outnumber those on the Nevada side. And before checkmate is declared sometime this summer, we will discover whether the state's king (also known in this version of the game as a whip) can maneuver out of a position that even Bobby Fischer probably could not escape.

Having raised expectations for a feckless West Wing gambit so soon after the Bush defense was shown to be a sham, Team Nevada now must hope for a deus ex machina move that is nowhere to be found in any chess handbook. As the notion of resignation -- a k a The Inevitability Strategy -- gains resonance with a growing number of pessimistic voters who don't see the game as winnable, Senate Majority Whip Harry Reid and his friends only have three months to prove they have not just been treating their constituents like easily moved and easily sacrificed pawns.

The endgame has revealed a cynicism within the state's political corps that has been latent for years:

There is a reluctance to spend money on an eleventh-hour public relations campaign to scare voters elsewhere about nuclear waste transportation, but how do you argue that it's not worth a shot because there is no game after this one ends?

The partisanship that has occasionally simmered and bubbled over is coming to the fore -- the finger-pointing by Democrats, the bobbing and weaving by Republicans. Both sides are looking three moves ahead, as any political grandmaster will do, in a raw, selfish search for advantage once the game ends.

And so after years of declaring victory when victory was not yet won, the state's political elite care mostly about preparing for defeat and ensuring who wears it.

Mayor Oscar Goodman, the once and future king of outrageous hyperbole, touched on the right issue when he couldn't stop himself last week as he talked about the complacency on the dump. "We hear this all the time, it went back to World War II ... where people who could have taken folks who ultimately ended up in gas chambers and led them into their native countries, instead put them on boats to go back in order to be incinerated."

The offensive analogy to the Holocaust notwithstanding, Goodman alighted on what every politician here fears the most -- voters have become inured to this fight but, if it is lost, may rise up to punish someone.

So what moves are left? I see only two:

The problem is that time is short. The House is sure to act quickly after Mr. Guinn goes to Washington, which will then put immense pressure on the Senate to act. Reid has received commitments to keep the measure bottled up for awhile, but how long can he hold off action? Which brings me to ...

Yes, I suppose it is possible that Sen. John Ensign could persuade enough of his GOP colleagues to vote against the administration and their minority leader who want the dump in Nevada -- but methinks no Ensign Surprise is in the offing.

Yes, I suppose that "The West Wing" could do a follow-up episode solely focused on the transportation of nuclear waste and terrify millions of Americans into calling their senators to oppose Yucca Mountain -- but counting on Aaron Sorkin seems a little far-fetched. (Now if we could only get Dr. Frasier Crane to counsel someone terrified about the risks of nuclear waste transportation ...)

And, yes, I suppose that all of those Republican senators might suddenly have an epiphany about their usual fealty to states' rights and decide to switch their allegiance to Nevada -- but something tells me the White House/Trent Lott hammer has more sway than any principle.

Most politicians here -- and Guinn and Rep. Shelley Berkley candidly declared so this week on "Face to Face" -- believe the better chance for victory is in a courtroom and not the political venue. The bad news is that the inevitability momentum will pick up if the fight is lost this summer. The good news, though, is that the clock that will be punched in the legal chess game counts in years, not days.