Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: A man of his word?

Friday, Feb. 8, 2002 | 5:08 a.m.

PROMISES, PROMISES.

I remember the play on Broadway. I don't remember a play that has brought any more joy than that one did almost 30 years ago. Perhaps it was the old-fashioned moral about making and keeping promises that tugged so hard at my emotions.

I thought of that play and, more specifically, the title as I pondered the effort that Nevada officials were making in Washington to try to persuade President George Bush not to do what everyone expects him to do -- break his promise to Nevadans and give us and our future what no one else in this country wants -- 10,000 years of heartache, anxiety and, yes, very bad health.

The reports of the meeting that Gov. Kenny Guinn and our two U.S. senators had this past Thursday with the president have been sparse in terms of the substance of the conversations that took place. But if we can read between the very large lines that have been drawn by what has been said, it appears more than likely that Bush will accept the recommendation of his Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham, and send the radioactive poison our way. That would be a mistake. A very big one both in terms of the health and safety of Nevadans and everyone else along the routes that the hundreds and hundreds of truckloads will take for the next 20 years, and in terms of the message that Bush would be sending to the citizens of this country.

While we have all come to expect our politicians to lie to us when they are running for office -- how else would we ever consider voting for some of them -- we have not yet ever had a president who looked us in the eye, told us he wouldn't do something and, then first chance he got, did it anyway. It is that grave disappointment in the democratic experiment under which we are all living that hangs in the balance of what Bush does to Nevada.

Let's back up a bit.

When it was candidate George Bush and candidate Al Gore trying to sway the voters in the Silver State for what turned out to be the deciding vote in President Bush's electoral college victory, the issue came down to which of the two men would best protect the citizens of this state from a political drubbing that no state and no people should have to endure in a free and democratic society. Gore had already made his views known -- he would never force the state of Nevada to accept the high-level nuclear waste unless and until science proved the site to be acceptable and safe, and science determined that burial at Yucca Mountain was the best approach. Gore had already joined then-President Bill Clinton in his steadfast refusal to let "bad politics" trump "good science" on this vital issue to Nevadans and the country.

We were coming down to the wire and the GOP in Nevada was getting nervous because their candidate still had not shown up in Southern Nevada, where the population was based and where the emotions were highest about being poisoned to death by the federal government. That's when Bush told us that he would match Gore word for word. He promised that only good science would drive his decision. Politics would play no part in this most solemn decision.

Now let's get back to our future.

This past week our president was in New York raising money and morale in that state, which was so devastated by the events of Sept. 11. Prior to his trip, the pundits had already opined that the $20 billion President Bush had promised New York to help it recover would be cut back significantly. As he stood next to Gov. George Pataki, who has his hands full in a re-election bid and can use the popularity of the war president to help him through, President Bush looked the crowd in the eye and said that he had promised New York $20 billion and he would make darn sure that the Empire State got the full amount because a promise is a promise and he would always keep his word.

That's what he said in a state with dozens and dozens of electoral votes come the next election. Only a skeptic would suggest that those numbers had anything to do with his promise-keeping, and I am not one of those. Yet.

Now we come to the state of Nevada. Even though we grew by one-third the number of congressional seats we will fill for the 2002 election, we are still close to 28 short of New York when it comes to counting heads in the U.S. House. That, I suppose, is what concerns most of us out here about this president. You see, even though a promise is a promise and President Bush always keeps his word, many people think that politics and not science will drive his decision on whether or not to accept the Abraham recommendation to send the nation's radioactive nightmare our way.

That decision would be rooted in the huge dollars the nuke industry throws at the Congress -- mostly Republican members who have been hell-bent to shove that stuff down our throats (here's where you have to listen to statements from none other than the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, who can't get that stuff here fast enough) -- and in the desire of the current administration to help its friends in the power industry get on with the business of building more nuclear power plants.

Rather than pay attention to the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office and other quasi-governmental agencies which claim without reservation that the work is not done and the science is not yet known -- except the science that would disqualify Yucca Mountain -- the Department of Energy would have this president make his decision without benefit of that which he said he would have before acting.

If a promise made is a promise kept for a state like New York which, by the way, did not vote for George Bush and cannot claim, as Nevada can, that we elected him, then a promise made must be a promise kept for Nevadans. If George W. Bush is a man of his word, then now is the time for him to keep it.

Now is the time for him to send Abraham and his recommendation back to the drawing board to get this thing right. And while he is at it, he can challenge the DOE to find a 21st century solution to the problem rather than the 18th century fix of burying the problem in our back yard.

Now, that would be leadership and that would be promise-keeping. Nevadans deserve at least that much from the man they made President of the United States.

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