Who didn't kill tobacco killers?

The Democrats were very quick to promote the proposition that the tobacco industry had "bought" the vote of the senators who said No on the proposed bill. Republican spokesmen took it on the chin for a bit in the public mall, but then one of them came up with a rather cute riposte. Well, he said, maybe it's true that the tobacco people bought off the Republicans. On the other hand, the trial lawyers bought off the Democrats, so we're even.

It's always distressing to hear it said that a vote one happens to agree with is the result of commercial seduction. Critics take it for granted that because Senator Jones voted No, he was spastically responding to expenditures by tobacco PR to do the wrong thing. Not much attention has been given to the component parts of that argument. Are the senators voting because they were bribed to do so by direct contributions to their campaigns by Tobacco? Or are we being told that the money spent on radio and television to inform (misinform?) the public resulted in a change of opinion that registered on the senators, when time came to vote? Almost 60 per cent of the American people opposed the then-current version of the proposed legislation. That being so, the Senate that turned the bill down was doing what the public wanted done. Next question: Was the public misinformed? Were the tobacco people lying?

If we apply the same order of curiosity to the trial lawyers, one notes that here a very important step in democratic punctilio is being ignored. The Trial Lawyers Association doesn't place full-page ads in the papers or 30-second spots on TV. What would they say? "Don't let Congress take away a trial lawyer's right to a million dollars"? I know the arguments of the trial lawyers at close quarters because two of them have argued their case on my television program and they are very persuasive. What they say in effect is that if you don't let them take a substantial part of the award, they will stop taking risks to defend the oppressed. But it is very difficult to condense that message into a television spot or even a page in the newspaper when the argument's bottom line is against an amendment to the congressional act that would have capped compensation at up to $4,000 per hour (what the tobacco lawyers who had been working on the cases longest would have got).

So that we don't have, with the trial lawyers, any sense of orderly democratic procedure, which is that a) the aggrieved or potentially aggrieved agents (tobacco companies, trial lawyers) state their case to the public; b) the public is roused and states its opinion to Congress; and c) Congress, the voice of the people, responds acquiescently.

So who are we supposed to be mad at today? President Clinton has declared a jihad against Tobacco, and his most recent proposal, early in the week, causes one to wonder. Has anything so . . . dumb been proposed in the last one hundred years? He has directed the Department of Health & Human Services to find out which are the best-selling cigarettes among minors aged 12 to 17. Let us suppose, simply for the exercise, that the investigators discover that Camel cigarettes are favored by the young illegal smokers. So what does President Clinton do with this datum?

He denounces the makers of Camel cigarettes. The immediate effect of that denunciation will be to persuade a million junior smokers to try Camel cigarettes. Even as they would try El Dorado marijuana if word went out that it was the most popular among the flower children. The advertising agency for Camel would find clients knocking down their door to hire them to use for the benefit of McDonald's hamburgers or Budweiser beer the techniques that ingratiated Camel cigarettes to American youth.

The utter frivolity of Mr. Clinton in his approach to the tobacco problem is enough to estrange Monica Lewinsky. If the states want young people to stop smoking, which presumably they do want them to do, since they have passed laws to that effect, they could act quickly and directly. Pass a law that anyone under 18 caught with cigarettes will lose his/her driver's license for six months. Why would Mr. Clinton hesitate to make that recommendation? When he was governor, he recommended disqualification for any school-age applicant for a driver's license who was not attending school.

But we are left with the mess we are in. Clearly the only way to go is to make way for the tobacco industry to hire the Trial Lawyers for endless litigation. Only that will bankrupt Big Tobacco.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc.
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