Up In Smoke

(3 of 5)

But a different drama was unfolding in private. On June 9, at the regular Tuesday lunch of Senate Republicans in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol, conservatives started passing out copies of a new survey by G.O.P. pollster Linda DiVall that showed that voters rejected the McCain bill 57% to 34%. Her findings on tobacco were startling--and exactly what some conservatives, and the tobacco companies, wanted to hear: when given the right message, respondents preferred a candidate who placed a higher priority on fighting illegal drug use than on raising cigarette taxes to fight teen smoking--and didn't like anything that looked like the return of Big Government.

By the end of that week, Republicans all over the Hill who opposed the McCain bill were talking about the DiVall poll. Never mind that the survey had been partly funded by the tobacco industry and the questions had been written in a way that tarred the bill. "If this is a crisis in America," said Gramm, "America doesn't know it." Flying with Lott to Barry Goldwater's funeral, Speaker Newt Gingrich had also made it clear how desperately the House wanted to avoid a big fight with its base supporters before November.

In the end, it was McConnell who was most persuasive. He told Lott that things had changed since the process had begun in April. His Senate candidates were safe; in tight Senate races, such as in North Carolina and Kentucky, defending tobacco would help more than hurt. Besides, McConnell argued, the industry was promising to run ads on behalf of G.O.P. Senators to defend them against charges that they'd killed the bill. "We can walk away from this," he told Lott.

G.O.P. Senators held a special conference in Lott's private offices Wednesday morning. From the moment Lott started the meeting, it became apparent to McCain that it had been called in order to choose a procedure for killing his bill. But McCain gave it one last try. "This has become a Republican bill!" McCain argued. "Are we going to say no to a tax cut and no to funding for the drug war? Are we going to say no to the two highest priorities in the Republican Congress?" The answer was still yes. "We're pulling it down, John," Lott told a deflated McCain.

In a lusciously cynical switch, the amendments that various G.O.P. Senators had tacked on to make the bill more palatable now made it easier to deride as a huge, mangled monument to Big Government. And so Lott spun in place and called for a vote on whether to let the bill come to the floor, knowing full well that McCain did not have the 60 votes he would need. And with that, any chance of passing a comprehensive bill died, stalling the engine that was meant to power the last two years of the Clinton presidency.