Washington ? If you need a favor from this administration, you’d better be from a big state that figures importantly in the president’s calculus for re-election.

That, at least, is the lesson that many politicians and political observers are taking from a pair of controversial decisions President Bush has announced in the past few weeks.

When it came to approving a nuclear waste dump for the nation at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Bush was willing to forget the promises he and Vice President Cheney had made in the last campaign. Nevadans thought they had a commitment that the Republicans would not ship the radioactive junk to the ranch country outside Las Vegas unless all the scientific and safety issues had been resolved. But late last month, Bush signed off on an Energy Department recommendation that Yucca Mountain be the repository.

Nevada had four electoral votes in 2000, and went very narrowly to Bush  in part because of the now-forgotten promise. Politicians in both parties say that if the decision sticks, he will have a harder time in 2004. But even with its rapid population growth, Nevada will have only five electoral votes next time around.

Big states do better. The question confronting the White House last week was whether to slap a tariff on imported steel, and Bush managed to rise above principle to please industry and workers in two much more important states, Ohio and Pennsylvania. His deviation from his avowed free-trade beliefs was described in a Wall Street Journal news story  not an editorial  as “the most dramatically protectionist step of any president in decades.” Bill Clinton, supposedly a more calculating politician, had twice refused union pressure to grant the same kind of tariff relief.

Bush’s decision was greeted with cheers in West Virginia, a normally Democratic state with five electoral votes that he carried last time. But it was not West Virginia’s Democratic governor or its two Democratic senators who swayed the president. The real lobbying heat came from Ohio and Pennsylvania, both with Republican governors and solidly Republican Senate delegations.

Last time, Bush carried Ohio with its 21 electoral votes but lost Pennsylvania and its 23. In a close presidential race, a candidate who carries both is almost assured of victory; lose both, and you are likely to be toast.

So when the economic side of the White House argued that tariffs on imported steel as high as 30 percent would invite almost certain retaliation from European and Asian governments and impede the broader international barrier-lowering initiative which Bush has espoused, their views were trumped by political advisers who count electoral votes.

Predictably, our major trading partners are up in arms about the decision. The March 7 Financial Times headline read: “World united to condemn U.S. decision to impose 30 percent tariffs.” Even the ever-loyal British prime minister, Tony Blair, called his Washington buddy’s action “unacceptable, unjustified and wrong.”

There were political costs at home, too. Auto and appliance manufacturers who will have to pay more for the steel they use as a result of the Bush decision are important in states such as Illinois and Michigan. Iowa’s Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley worried aloud that farm exports vital to his state might be the targets of retaliatory action. But Illinois and Michigan and Iowa have been in the Democratic presidential column three elections in a row; their leverage at the White House is less.

There was another option that the White House rejected. One reason the old U.S. steel mills are struggling against their foreign competitors is that many such companies are burdened with pension and health care costs of retirees who worked for them when employment in the industry was much higher than it is today. The companies would have liked help from Uncle Sam in meeting those “legacy” costs, but with the federal budget again in deficit, Washington cannot afford any such obligations. So tariff relief was the consolation prize.

The nicest touch in the Bush policy is its timing. Tariffs on most steel imports will begin at 30 percent, then decline to 24 percent and 18 percent in the second and third years. They phase out entirely three years from now.

Let’s see. Three years from now will be 2005, the year after the next election. If Bush wins, no one should be surprised if the steel industry finds itself jilted by the White House at that point. Just ask Nevada.

 David Broder is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.