Up In Smoke

Like any smoky gentlemen's club, the U.S. Senate includes some members the others wish had never got in. Too pushy. Always wanting to change things, even bedrock traditions like due respect for the marriage of money and power. So when the deeply scarred, highly disruptive Republican John McCain stood on the Senate floor last Wednesday, stared down his colleagues and accused them of honoring their debts to Big Tobacco over their obligations to "those who can't care for themselves in this society, and that includes our children," the few G.O.P. statesmen present sat silent while Democrats across the aisle stood and applauded. McCain walked out of the chamber.

How did it happen that one of the decade's most ambitious pieces of legislation, which had so defied the odds that it seemed on the brink of passing, could have died so suddenly last week? McCain's landmark tobacco bill would have raised at least $516 billion over the next 25 years from higher cigarette taxes while increasing regulation, capping liability and fighting teen smoking. President Clinton was staking the finale of his presidency on moving the bill--not to mention the $65.5 billion worth of education and health programs in his budget that were pegged to new revenues. A majority of Senators supported some kind of legislation, and the public had clearly signaled its disgust for a mendacious industry that had been exposed in a series of court cases for specifically targeting children in its advertising to ensure a steady supply of lifetime customers.

There was no mood change in the country, only one in the narrow political calculations of its major political players: a Republican Congress with a slim majority desperate to play to the activists who will turn out in the fall, a White House too distracted and declawed by scandal to fight and an electorate too content to complain much.

Certainly the breathtaking $40 million ad campaign by the tobacco industry left its mark on those voters who were paying attention; just as the health-insurance industry recast Clinton's health-care initiative four years ago as a bureaucratic monster, the tobacco industry successfully reframed the legislation as a Big Government, big-spending, tax-hiking mess. But that effort alone could not have worked if a lot of politicians had not sat down and done the math and found that the poll numbers did not add up the way they had long expected. In the months leading up to the midterm elections, when only the party's hard-core base of supporters can be counted on to turn up, Republicans are more concerned with the priorities of the social conservatives and the business community than with a broader public that doesn't seem to be paying much attention anyway.