The American Spectator

p> NOT USED TO THE DRILL br> Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, along with several Republican Senate leaders, demanded an explanation from Karl Rove last week after President Bush announced that his Energy Department and Department of the Interior would pay out more than a quarter billion dollars to buy back mineral rights near the Everglades and parts of the Florida coast in order to prevent oil and gas drilling in the area. /p>

This, after the White House essentially rolled over in its fight with Democrats and left-wing environmental groups over whether to allow drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

According to several Senate staff sources, the White House told Stevens that the Florida decision was made for several reasons: widespread grassroots environmental support for a ban on the offshore drilling, support for the ban by the president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and support from Florida’s two Democratic senators, Bob Graham and Bill Nelson. “Of course, it was Jeb and his re-election that they were thinking about,” says one GOP Senate staffer. “Since when has that White House given a damn about what Nelson thought? The White House had staffers on background just about admitting it was a political decision.”

It isn’t the White House’s playing politics with environmentalists that has Stevens and others mad. It’s that Republicans on the Hill believe the White House had polling data from Florida that showed this decision to block drilling would have little or no effect on Jeb’s political standing, or the president’s, yet the White House moved on it anyway.

“If they saw the numbers we saw,” says a Republican staffer on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, “then they know that these folks who were making noise about this swamp drilling in Florida weren’t going to do the Bushes any favors anytime soon. These are the same nuts who are blocking ANWR, telling the same lies, pushing the same agenda. Bush just cut the legs out from under us on just about every potential oil and natural gas drilling proposal we deal with in the next two years. And he’ll have nothing to show for it. Nothing.”

p> THE EMANUEL MANUAL br> In the Clinton years, so much was made of the money pipeline from Hollywood.