Sugar Plum.

Focuses on a controversy surrounding the sugar industry in the United States. Big Sugar, like Big Oil or Big Tobacco, has become a stock symbol of corporate greed and backroom politics, while the Florida Everglades, once generally reviled as a pestilential swamp, has become a beloved symbol of environmental rebirth and bipartisan cooperation. Politicians don't want to be accused of carrying water for Big Sugar or messing with the Everglades. Now, however, Florida Governor Jeb Bush has been accused of both. Big Sugar has unleashed a battalion of 46 lobbyists--including two former Florida House speakers and two former gubernatorial chiefs of staff--to push for a bill in the Florida legislature that would weaken the state's decade-old Everglades cleanup rules. And Jeb's administration, if not quite marching in lockstep with the industry, has certainly provided aid and comfort during the battle. The amended bill that Governor Bush now plans to sign is not so extreme, but it has still jeopardized the most ambitious--and perhaps the most popular--environmental project in the history of the planet, an $8 billion rescue mission for the gators, panthers, and wading birds of the long-abused River of Grass. Jeb was just reelected in November, but this fight could create an electoral nightmare for his older brother in 2004. If President George W. Bush sides with Jeb and Big Sugar--and against some officials in his own administration, who privately describe the bill with words such as "shameful," "sinful," "an utter disaster," and "a fundamental betrayal"--he will pay a political price in the ultimate swing state.