Bread and circuses: up in smoke

The sudden death of the $5l6-billion tobacco legislation is a tribute to the public's good sense and antipathy to excessive government power. In April, well before the politicians saw through the smoke, the public decided that the bill's sponsors were "mainly interested in getting additional tax revenue for the government." Only 20 per cent believed President Clinton's line about wanting to cut teen smoking by raising cigarette prices. Now, the President's inability to deliver on his agenda is again exposed, and it's the Democrats for a change who are trying to figure out what happened to their lofty plans.

Their first mistake was failing to heed a warning about the danger of handing the Republicans the opportunity to cast a vote against a tax increase. As head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska has the tough task of trying to elect more Democrats to the Senate. According to Senate sources, he cautioned his colleagues that it was not good politics to vote for big tax-increases in an election year. He was ignored by a Democratic caucus chafing under me balanced-budget regime and desperate for new billions for new programs.

Democrats also failed to recognize the similarities between the current war on tobacco and the health-care battle of tour years ago. Just as they overreached then--when they went for the whole enchilada and lost, whereas a scaled-back version of Hillary Clinton's reform package had a good chance of passing--this time they abandoned the plenty-big negotiated tobacco settlement. While Republicans have had difficulty learning to act like a majority party, the Democrats have found it hard to stop acting like one. With their self-confidence and political will reinforced by all the best editorial boards and the usual constellation of Democratic interest groups, they were convinced of their ability to shove through the behemoth bill.

Confused Senate Democrats are now attempting to regroup. John Kerry wants to try again to pass a bill like the McCain bill that just failed. John Breaux hopes to reach a compromise with Republicans on Orrin Hatch's new bill. Ted Kennedy, on the other hand, believes that Majority Leader Trent Lott has the votes to defeat any version of the McCain bill, and that Republicans won't support the limits on tobacco companies' liability which the Hatch bill would provide. He's right.

Since Democrats can't get the bill they want from the Republican majority, Kennedy favors continuing to raise Cain over the defeat of McCain. The Republicans think they've won, he counsels his Democratic colleagues, but in so doing they have given the Democrats a potent political issue. About that, he's wrong.

The Republicans have gained safe political ground because they have figured out how they can be anti-tobacco-industry, anti-teen-smoking, and anti-tax all at the same time. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay led the way. In April, when other Republican lawmakers were resigned to the "unstoppable" McCain bill, DeLay laid out what would become the winning GOP line of attack in the Wail Street Journal: "I opposed the so-called tobacco settlement because I believed that giving tobacco companies immunity from liability was wrong. I also opposed giving trial attorneys exorbitant fees, as proposed in the settlement. But that doesn't mean we should use this as an excuse to increase taxes on hardworking Americans."

Meanwhile, conservative senators convinced Lott, who thought Republicans had to pass a bill, to slow down and give the tobacco industry's ads a chance to work. They appear to have done so. By Memorial Day, one Western senator had received 11,000 phone calls concerning the bill. Only 41 were in favor. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Bob Kerrey's GOP counterpart, had been in Lott's camp but concluded that the bill could safely be killed. Within a week, it was.

A recent poll found that 52 per cent of Democrats would be less likely to vote to re-elect their congressman if he voted "to increase taxes on working people who smoke." This November, two already vulnerable Senate Democrats, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, will be among the tax hikers that Bob Kerrey is trying to re-elect. Democrats should now be as worried about being seen as pro-tax as Republicans once were about appearing to be pro-tobacco.

To give themselves additional cover on that front, in late June House Republicans unveiled a proposal with the battle cry, "Teens, Not Taxes." They point out that while the President has been carrying on about teen tobacco use, marijuana use among 12th-graders has skyrocketed. Republicans will drive home this fact by emphasizing the anti-drug provisions in their bill.

They also believe that they've bested President Clinton by refusing to provide tobacco companies the kind of liability protection that he supported. A more worrisome part of their attempt to demonstrate their antipathy toward their past political benefactors is the fact that their proposal includes unspecified expansions of the Food and Drug Administration's authority to regulate tobacco and the Federal Trade Commission's ability to regulate cigarette ads.