Perkins is a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune

George W. Bush is making his first presidential visit to California this week. He can expect a chilly reception both from the state's politicos, led by Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, and the increasingly hostile California press.

They fault Bush for not bailing California out of its self-inflicted electricity crisis (the result of a misbegotten, misnamed "deregulation," plan, which, among other things, required the state's utilities to divest themselves of their power generating plants).

They claim that the president is indifferent to the Golden State's woes. And they lament that the Texan does not feel California's pain the way, say, Bubba would have.

Davis, whose job approval rating has plummeted 20 points since last fall (according to recent poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California), has become particularly strident.

He excoriated the president last week for supposedly "allowing the price-gouging energy companies, many of which reside in Texas, to get away with murder."

And he directed yet another cheap shot at Bush, challenging the president "to stand up to your friends in the energy business and exercise the federal government's exclusive responsibility to ensure energy prices are reasonable."

Davis is desperate. To save his political hide, he reckons, he's got to find someone, other than himself, on whom to blame California's electricity crisis.

So he suggests that Bush, a former Texas oilman, is in cahoots with those nefarious Texas energy companies; that the president is getting some sort of pay-off for allowing electricity suppliers to charge what the market will bear.

But here's the dirty little under reported secret about Davis's own relationship with energy companies: They've been among his biggest financial supporters.

Indeed, Davis accepted more than $600,000 from utilities, power generators and marketers during 1999 and 2000, according to Common Cause. (By comparison, electric utilities contributed slightly less than $450,000 to Bush's presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics).

Then there's the matter of the governor's decision to retain the services of "consultants" Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, who also happen to work for Southern California Edison (trying to win support for a $3.5 billion bailout to rescue that utility from bankruptcy).

The former Clinton apparatchiks will be paid a combined $30,000 a month by California taxpayers for at least the next six months to assist Davis in an attack campaign against Bush administration energy policy.

Also, to help the governor persuade California's more than 30 million residents, facing rolling blackouts this summer, that he bears no responsibility for the state's electricity crisis.

Of course, to make such a case requires that Davis and his hired guns gloss over a few very salient facts, as The Sacramento Bee's  Dan Walters reported last weekend.

Davis got an early warning about California's looming electricity crisis, Walters reminded, when San Diego Gas & Electric customers began receiving substantially higher bills a year ago.

Private and public energy experts proposed that the state's putative "deregulation" be suspended, that rates be raised slightly and that California utilities be allowed to enter long-term electricity supply contracts to stabilize the market.

"But," noted Walters, "Davis and his handpicked state Public Utilities Commission president, Loretta Lynch, stalled for time.

Less than a month after the crisis first revealed itself in San Diego, the PUC voted 3-to-2 to allow long-term contracts at roughly 5 cents per kilowatt hour. But Lynch denounced the commission's decision. And in a matter of days it was overturned by legislation that Davis signed.

So now California utilities are forced to pay more than 10 times as much for electricity.

And the governor who could have prevented that from happening, could have spared the state treasury billions of dollars, could have protected the state's biggest utilities from bankruptcy, places the blame on a president who wasn't even in office when Davis first became aware of his state's looming electricity crisis.

Bush has refused to order wholesale price caps of electricity -- even though doing so would ingratiate him to Davis and other California politicos. Even though it would earn him favorable press coverage in the nation's most populous state.

The president stands on economic principle (rather than political expedience). That may not go over especially well here in the Golden State. But that doesn't mean Bush doesn't care about California.