Friday, June 21, 2002 | 4:48 a.m.
Bill Simon Jr., the Republican nominee in the California governor's race, was happy last week after emerging from his meeting at the White House with presidential aides. Simon told reporters that he extracted a promise that President Bush would open discussions on removing oil rigs along parts of the California coast. "The bottom line really is that the Bush administration is willing to sit down and talk about these issues," said Simon, who is struggling in his bid to unseat Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis. Bush previously has opposed getting rid of oil rigs along the California coast, a position that has hurt his popularity in that state.
Hmmm. Now why does the situation in California have such a familiar ring?
Flash back a few months to February. Nevada Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn, accompanied by Nevada's U.S. senators, Harry Reid and John Ensign, had a meeting in the Oval Office with President Bush to lay out the state's opposition to a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. "After today I believe he's going to give this some serious thought," Guinn told reporters after the meeting. "I did feel much better." A few days later Guinn choked on that good feeling when President Bush went ahead and recommended that Congress bury 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in Nevada, a decision that broke his cynical 2000 campaign promise that a Yucca Mountain recommendation would be based on science. It was a promise, by the way, that Guinn crowed about and which helped secure Nevada's electoral votes in the presidential election.
Simon might end up getting a better response from Bush because California has so many electoral votes (more than 10 times as many as Nevada). Still, if Bush doesn't see California as being in play in 2004, California's environmental's concerns will get ignored, and the energy industry's demands will be met, just as they were in Nevada. Unfortunately for Simon he's not related to the president. A few weeks ago Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had a meeting in the Oval Office with his brother, and the president gave him a nice gift for his gubernatorial re-election bid: a deal to set aside $235 million to buy back oil leases in the Everglades and off the Florida coast. Something tells us the president will honor that commitment.
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