Then there was the series of interviews on Nov. 1, when Mr. Obama spoke with a number of media outlets along the Keystone route. In one brief interview with a Nebraska TV station, he took ownership of the pipeline decision as his to make. It was clear he knew what he was talking about, making references to the water issues, for example, that had dominated the debate in Nebraska.
“It’s blatant politics,” said David Wilkins, former U.S. ambassador to Canada, in an interview Friday. Mr. Wilkins lobbied for Keystone on behalf of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “It’s politics at its worst. It was a move by the president to placate a certain wing of his party and I think it was a real travesty.”
Mr. Wilkins pointed out that Mr. Obama had passed up 20,000 Keystone jobs to “protect one job, his own.”
Canadian industry officials were confident Keystone XL would win approval, even amid unusual signals. In October, a request had come down from Ms. Clinton herself asking that no Canadians be present at a Washington hearing into the pipeline. Canadian officials saw the request as a suggestion that Ms. Clinton supported the project, and didn’t want a Canadian presence to further disturb the peace.
But there were other warning signs. David Goldwyn, the State Department’s Special Envoy and Co-ordinator for International Energy Affairs, was seen as a Keystone supporter but left to pursue a private career. He had actually travelled to the oil sands in late 2010 with Gary Mar, the former Alberta cabinet minister who was then serving as the province’s representative in Washington.
In January, Mr. Mar invited the governors of the seven states along the Keystone XL route to a breakfast meeting. The only one not to show was Dave Heineman, the Nebraska governor who would, months later, publicly oppose the Keystone XL pipeline route.
That’s when alarm bells started to sound. Both TransCanada and the Canadian government substantially increased their lobbying efforts around the beginning of this year, when it started to seem plausible that they could lose this project.
Mr. Heineman’s opposition was, however, viewed as naked politicking. Nebraska has a long history of governors graduating to become powerful U.S. senators, and Mr. Heineman, some believe, wants to unseat Ben Nelson, a Democrat who currently holds one of Nebraska’s Senate seats.
Still, Nebraska’s fight soon took on national political significance. In some ways, it offered the White House an easy argument. When Mr. Heineman called a special legislative session to examine new “siting” rules that would let Nebraska move a pipeline route, it provided solid evidence that Keystone clearly did not have universal support.
Other issues were also at play, of course: the BP spill had enlivened in many Americans a sense that oil production and transportation is fraught with risk. TransCanada’s decision to purchase pipeline steel from India angered a country pursuing a Buy America agenda. TransCanada’s heavy-handed dealings with landholders inflamed local passions. Its high-level corporate lobbying backfired when e-mails were released that suggested an overly cozy relationship with the State Department. That prompted the State Department’s inspector-general to announce an investigation into whether TransCanada’s involvement in its own review might constitute a conflict of interest.
TransCanada also struggled to shift public attitudes in Nebraska, where it faced even more blowback: an ad at a college football game received so many boos that it was pulled. Revelations of the company’s heavy lobbyist spending brought comparisons of the corporate conduct of Big Tobacco. Critics waged war through social media, while TransCanada relied heavily on a single communications consultant to offer its responses.
Still, the pipeline’s defenders said they did all they could.
Keystone supporters “dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s,” Mr. Wilkins said. “I think it was in the end a cop-out by the administration to placate their base.”
