Up In Smoke

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Most calculating of all is Senate majority leader Trent Lott, the man who allowed the bill to get as far as it did--and the man who ultimately killed it. Lott's willingness to work with Clinton in years past had produced a balanced budget, a chemical-weapons treaty and a reformed welfare system. This time, cutting a deal on a tobacco bill began to look like his "least worst option." He remembered well how Clinton and the Democrats had humiliated Bob Dole after Dole told Katie Couric that smoking might not be addictive. If the Republicans were seen to be blocking antismoking legislation at a time when the tobacco industry was by far the biggest soft-money donor to the G.O.P., they'd be pummeled by the White House and Democrats in the midterm elections.

When the wrestling began earlier this spring, even Lott's close ally Mitch McConnell, from Kentucky tobacco country, was telling him he had to pass something. McConnell hated the McCain bill. He called it "a turkey" in public and worse in private. But he advised Lott to push the process forward rather than get run over by it. Lott went to McCain and asked him to craft a bill in the Commerce Committee, knowing he was the man to get an ugly job done. McCain had credibility with Democrats and the White House; and if the process exploded in McCain's face, that wouldn't be such a disaster either. A lot of McCain's colleagues would be happy to see that happen to the man with a habit of exposing pork-barrel projects, pushing campaign-finance reform and generally making life less comfortable for his Republican colleagues.

McCain muscled his bill out of committee with a 19-to-1 vote after several days of bruising negotiations. He took the original $368 billion deal the state attorneys general had struck with the tobacco industry last year and went much further. McCain's version would have cost cigarette makers some $516 billion over 25 years, with more legal liability and serious penalties if teen smoking didn't actually drop. Lott followed the process closely and constantly reassured McCain that he was supporting his chairman. "Trent Lott has been straight with me throughout this process," McCain said repeatedly. Privately, those close to the process who wanted a bill counted Lott as a tacit ally.

In fact, Lott's complicity created all kinds of problems for him within his own party. Some members hated the prospect of losing tobacco money: farm-state Senators worried about their tobacco farmers; tax haters like Phil Gramm were against tax increases in general. Pulled in opposite directions, Lott wiggled his way through the process, some days describing the McCain bill as big and bad and unworkable, the next day suggesting it should survive. "Just be patient," he told a proponent recently. "We'll get there." He promised proponents that the bill would have a much better chance at passing if they allowed amendments like Gramm's, which would cut the "marriage penalty" in the tax code, and Senators Paul Coverdell and Larry Craig's, which would provide new antidrug funding. Those amendments passed two weeks ago, and suddenly it seemed that the McCain bill might defy the odds and clear the Senate.