Saturday, March 28, 1998

GOP tobacco choice: Pass bill or die

By Morton Kondracke

Congressional Republicans face what ought to be an easy choice: Pass comprehensive tobacco legislation this year and reap the credit, or get clobbered by Democrats if they fail to do so.

In stark campaign terms, the choice for members of Congress is between mounting their own ads saying, "Last year we balanced the budget, this year we saved kids from cigarettes, so vote for us" -- or having opponents morph the faces of incumbents into Joe Camel.

The choice is becoming increasingly clear to GOP leaders, which improves chances a bill can pass this year. However, a lot of serious thinking and fighting has to occur before that happens, and there's not much time left this year in which to do it.

On the positive side of the choice, one Republican official said, "This could be the equivalent of last year's bipartisan budget deal, a move that lets both parties show value.

"It'd help the President show he's doing the country's work and not dead in the water with scandal. It'd help Congress defend itself against the do nothing' charge. And if there's a tobacco tax, they'd have billions of dollars to divvy up."

On the negative side, according to a GOP source, House leaders last week heard from two of the party's best pollsters, Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group and Wes Anderson of Fabrizio-McLaughlin, that the public strongly supports action to halt teen-age smoking and that incumbent members could find their opponents turning Congress' failure to act into a cutting issue in November.

Similarly, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said, "I could easily see a candidate saying '3,000 kids a day are getting hooked and Congressman X didn't care. He had two years to do something, but he was on vacation.' This also fits in nicely with the 'do-nothing Congress' theme."

It doesn't really take polling to warn the GOP there's danger ahead if Congress fails to pass a bill. President Clinton on March 12 told the National Association of State Attorneys General, "I think we should say clearly and simply that Congress should not go home until it passes comprehensive tobacco legislation."

Moreover, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., already has accused the GOP of being "frozen because they have gotten huge amounts of money from tobacco companies. They don't want to offend them."

A pollster advising Senate Democrats said that "tobacco money is the most tainted political money there is."

A New York Times analysis showed earlier this month that Gephardt actually was the second-biggest single recipient of tobacco money in the House from 1991 to 1997, after Rep. Tom Bliley, R-Va.

But Gephardt has stopped taking tobacco money, and in recent years GOP candidates and committees have collected more than four times what Democrats have received.

In 1995 and 1996, according to the Times, Republicans got $8.8 million from tobacco companies and PACs, while Democrats got $2.1 million.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, tobacco giant Philip Morris gave Republican committees $980,000 in 1997 but just $60,000 to Democrats.

According to one of his advisers, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., "is determined not to let the party get tagged as the tool of Big Tobacco, but I'm not sure Republicans understand yet how to do that."

Even though polls show voters favor Food and Drug Administration regulation of tobacco by a two-to-one margin, some Republicans still oppose that idea for ideological reasons.

Polls also show two-to-one approval of increased tobacco taxes, but many Republicans are reluctant to impose them because they would produce huge revenues Clinton wants to spend on social programs and medical research.

Lately, though, it's occurred to GOP leaders they can find other uses for the pot of money -- cutting other taxes or "saving Medicare," as Senate Budget Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has proposed. Many Republicans also favor health research.

Another complication is that Republicans want to avoid the charge that they've served Big Tobacco by granting companies protection against legal liability, a key aspect of the global settlement with the states that tobacco companies are insisting upon. And Republicans would like to limit the profits made by trial lawyers, a Democratic money source.

Besides these barriers, various Senate committees are having difficulty processing tobacco legislation, the House has barely begun working on specific legislation, antismoking hard-liners are insisting on no liability protection for tobacco companies, and while talks are under way with the White House, there is no agreement because the GOP has no firm position.

And the clock is ticking, with only around 50 workdays left this year. The GOP has to act fast, but the choice is clear: Do good, have revenue to spend, and get credit -- or be identified as the party of Big Tobacco.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.

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