Thursday, May 28, 1998

Campaign money's smell tops logic

By Donald Kaul

And you thought alcohol and gasoline didn't mix. You must have been paying attention to those ads sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Silly you.

Your time would have been better spent watching Congress, where negotiators rejected a bill to withhold highway funds from states that failed to lower their drunk driving blood-alcohol thresholds to .08 percent. (Fifteen states already have done that, but the more usual standard is .1 percent.)

Instead of the tougher standards favored by the Senate, negotiators accepted the House version, which takes out the penalties and gives states that adopt the lower limits extra highway money.

Highway safety groups immediately denounced the move as a sell-out to the liquor lobby. Congressional leaders said they were merely trying to avoid a fight that would stall passage of the six-year, $200-billion highway bill, which the drunk driving measure was a part of.

Personally, I favor the sell-out explanation. As one congressional official said to the New York Times, it was a case of "deep emotions versus deep pockets." The pockets won.

You might say the Republican majority sold out the Republic, but it wouldn't be true. The Washington Post recently published a list of the biggest congressional recipients of liquor lobby money. Right at the top were Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, as you might expect. Right up there with them were the two top Democrats, Sen. Tom Daschle and Rep. Dick Gephardt.

You have to say this for lobbyists: They are equal opportunity employers. They will buy off legislators without regard to sex, race or political affiliation.

It is little wonder with three of the most powerful lobbies in Washington being those for gas, guns and alcohol, our national policy toward gas, guns and alcohol is eccentric to the point of lunacy. Our policy toward gasoline and its various users is perhaps the battiest.

By any rational assessment, we should be trying to wean people away from the use of cars. Because:

n They produce inordinate amounts of air pollution and may very well be contributing to global warning and the death of the planet. In any case, they make us sick.

n They take up far, far too much space, forcing our cities to spill out over the verdant countryside, where shopping malls eat up productive farm land, pristine deserts and prize recreational areas.

n They are slow. Anyone who has lived in a metropolitan area where the roads are seized with gridlock every morning and afternoon knows what I'm talking about. Cars are lauded for their convenience, but what's convenient about getting stuck in a traffic jam?

n They are expensive. Not only do they cost a lot to buy (nearly $20,000, on average), they cost a lot to maintain, repair, insure and park.

So why do we keep acting as though it's a good thing much of our economy is based on selling evermore cars that keep getting bigger and less fuel efficient?

Why do we continue to resist all efforts to make gas more expensive (which would at least encourage the purchase of smaller, more fuel-efficient models) and keep building wider and wider roads whose purpose seems to be to create even bigger traffic tie-ups?

Because that's where the campaign money is, Kiddo, and where campaign money is, votes will follow. That's the equation that informs Washington.

The highway bill allocates $167 million for highway projects (which will increase traffic) and $33 million for mass transit (to decrease traffic). How smart is that?

Scott Hodge, a conservative think-tank consultant, has figured out you could gold plate two lanes of every interstate highway in the nation -- that's 46,000 miles of highway times two -- for about $175 billion, only a few bucks more than what we will spend over the next six years on concrete and asphalt. And that's high quality, heavy gold electroplate, the kind found on pretty good jewelry.

And they're talking about tapping into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska so that gasoline can be made even cheaper. The environmentalists are fighting them off, but the day will come ... the day will come.

Representative democracy of our sort is still young enough to be an experiment. It may yet fail.

E-mail Donald Kaul at otcoffee@aol.com or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services. Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.