What's wrong with this picture: Bully pulpiteer FDR lights up for the cameras at the start of his 11th year in the White House in March 1943. AP Photo

How Big Tobacco Walked a Mile for a Settlement
And why it thinks the T-shirt is lousy

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Maybe putting Big Tobacco and Big Government in the same cage and trying to get them to mate was just unnatural, a misbegotten match. Because just a few years back, it was all so simple. Tobacco companies were evil. They lied to Congress. They bullied dying plaintiffs. They killed our kids with their cartoon camels and their lonesome cowboys, and to rub it in, they turned that ungodly 34 percent profit. Politicians, meanwhile, got to be heroes; they could fret aloud and stomp their feet about doing something about tobacco, and a Phillip Morris lobbyist would always be around to talk them out of it. Government and sin were adversaries, as Americans prefer them to be, and even if you smoked, you knew whom to root for at the water cooler.

Then the states had to go and spoil it by making a deal. There were cleaner solutions: have smokers contribute more to their health insurance; impose cigarette taxes unilaterally. Or just leave it alone -- keep holding a "Great American Smoke-Out" every year and let the industry continue to risk catastrophe in the courts, hoping for a citizens' windfall (although the companies hadn't lost one yet). But the states wanted to recoup their health-care dollars without taxing those constituents whose lungs were still pink. So the attorneys general secured tough advertising restrictions, more money for anti-smoking campaigns and a modest price hike, and in exchange let the industry off the hook on class-action lawsuits. It seemed fair enough. But no one in Washington would touch it.

Perhaps the creepiest thing for politicians about Michael Moore's deal with the dragon was that the dragon was OK with it, and government wasn't supposed to work that way. If America was going to fight a "war" on something, weren't we supposed to win? This wasn't poverty or cocaine or world hunger, after all -- this was just a bunch of tobacco companies. Why compromise? So for a year, it just sat there getting endorsed in principle and scorched on specifics. And nobody from either party would pick it up.

Then President Clinton put the tobacco money. . . (continued)