Jul. 29--The moment it became clear last Friday that the Assembly was about to reject a deal brokered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders that would have paved the way for the first offshore oil drilling project in state waters in 40 years was when the Assembly member from California's oil patch stood to speak in favor of the idea.

"I happen to love oil wells," said Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield. "I am most envious of Beverly Hills High School for having one on their campus, and I want one on my next high school campus."

Her comment and others from the "drill, baby, drill" crowd were, as they say in politics, off message.

It might have helped if just one had stood up and argued instead that this was a bad deal that would help one oil company in the short run but permanently damage the hopes of ever tapping into the petroleum resources off California's coast.

Keep in mind that the main selling point Schwarzenegger and other supporters were using to try to sell majority Democrats on the idea was that the deal would trigger the beginning of the end of drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara.

This was a good deal, they argued, because the Texas-based Plains Exploration and Production Co. (PXP) had promised, in exchange for the right to tap into state reserves for 14 years, to abandon four offshore platforms after that time was up and also to dismantle onshore processing equipment and turn over the land on which it now sits to a public trust.

That trade-off had been enough to win over Santa Barbara's Environmental Defense Center, the feisty legal group that over the years has been one of the most persistent and effective foes of drilling off the Central Coast.

The center's lead attorney, Linda Krop, is arguably one of the best environmental lawyers in the state. She and the EDC were among the PXP project's biggest backers. "What this will do," Krop told me last week, "is stop something. It will protect against new leasing in the future."

Without the existing onshore infrastructure to process oil, Krop said she felt the oil industry's incentive to develop new leases would virtually disappear.

She may have been right, but because of the political symbolism, this project never had a chance. It would have been, after all, the first approval for a new project since the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.

The symbolic precedent is what allowed Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, to lobby successfully to defeat the proposal. He helped mobilize more than four-dozen environmental groups around the state, including the Sierra Club, to pressure lawmakers and Schwarzenegger to back away from the deal.