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the battleground states director for Obama's 2008 campaign. "It's how we would lead a lot of discussions."
• President Bush signed the bill that December.
• It would fall on the next president to figure out how to make it work.
• ___
• President Obama's team at the EPA was sour on the ethanol mandate from the start.
• As a way to reduce global warming, they knew corn ethanol was a dubious proposition. Corn demands fertilizer, which is made using natural gas. What's worse, ethanol factories typically burn coal or gas, both of which release carbon dioxide.
• Then there was the land conversion, the most controversial and difficult-to-predict outcome.
• Digging up grassland releases greenhouse gases, so environmentalists are skeptical of any program that encourages planting more corn.
• "I don't remember anybody having great passion for this," said Bob Sussman, who served on Obama's transition team and recently retired as EPA's senior policy counsel. "I don't have a lot of personal enthusiasm for the program."
• At the White House and the Department of Agriculture, though, there was plenty of enthusiasm.
• One of Obama's senior advisers, Pete Rouse, had worked on ethanol issues as chief of staff to Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a major ethanol booster and now chair of the DuPont Advisory Committee on Agriculture Innovation and Productivity.
• Another adviser at the time, Heather Zichal, grew up in northeast Iowa -- as a child, she was crowned "sweet corn princess" -- and was one of the Obama campaign's leading voices on ethanol in her home state.
• The administration had no greater corn ethanol advocate than Vilsack, the former Iowa governor.
• "Tom understands that the solution to our energy crisis will be found not in oil fields abroad but in our farm fields here at home," Obama said in 2008. "That is the kind of leader I want in my Cabinet."
• ___
• Writing the regulations to implement the ethanol mandate was among the administration's first major environmental undertakings. Industry and environmental groups watched closely.
• The EPA's experts determined that the mandate would increase demand for corn

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