The issue isn't
campaign donations, it's an economic policy promulgated by the Clinton
EPA. And Whitman is adhering to it, while Clinton's order didn't.
A study was done by the Clinton administration's EPA that attempted to quantify the value of a human life for regulatory purposes -- in essence, how much per life should a regulation force American businesses to spend? The conclusion was somewhere around $8.1 million, so a line was set that a regulation should be promulgated if the total cost divided by the estimated number of lives saved wound up at or below this figure.
Under the current arsenic threshhold, approximately 80 people could be expected to die in a year due to arsenic poisoning from the water system. That's 80 people out of 280 million or so, approximately .00002857% of the population. Clinton's midnight orders would have ratcheted this number down to 30. The new rules were estimated to cost $200 billion (replacing filters in every single water treatment plant in America), or approximately $4 billion per person saved. According to the $8 million rule, no way in hell this should be enacted. (A similar concept was mentioned in the movie Fight Club; see Pyrogenic's WU at The Formula.)
But Clinton violated his own rule. Clinton knew the amount of damage that kind of a policy would do to the economy, so he waited until he was a lame duck to promulgate it. Now Bush, in preventing such damage, has set off the political land mine laid for him by his predecessor.
Always remember: Bill Clinton is the greatest pure politician of modern times. No matter what you may think of his policy, he intuitively knows how to manipulate the American political system better than anyone in years.
Source: The Neal Boortz show.