>>"Mr. President, how does it make you feel to have your great goals for our country thwarted by those tobacco loving Republican pigmeys."
While most of the Media let's Clinton and the Dems get away with it, the WSJ has a big article today concerning the duplicity of the Dems on tobacco. Seems their change of view had little to do with conviction, rather it's because they no longer represented the South and therefore no longer received the bulk of tobacco campaign money.
And guess what? Despite their pledge not to accept tobacco money, the Dems still do! As does Gore!
Democratic Leaders Disagree
About Tobacco Contributions
By JOHN HARWOOD and BRIAN DUFFY
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- When Vice President Al Gore told the 1996
Democratic convention of his sister's death from cancer, he pledged to
"pour my heart and soul" into protecting Americans from the dangers of
smoking. And he began lobbying party leaders to stop accepting the
tobacco industry's money.
It paid off a few months later, when the Democratic National Committee
swore off donations from tobacco companies, their political-action
committees or their top executives. "To send anything other than a clear
and unequivocal message," party Chairman Steve Grossman explains now,
"wouldn't be right."
Clear and unequivocal? Just one floor down
from Mr. Grossman's office at DNC
headquarters, "we do accept tobacco
money," says Rep. Martin Frost of Texas,
chairman of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee. And when a group of
donors assembled in a New York skyscraper
early this month to discuss assisting Mr.
Gore's new political-action committee, among
their hosts was Loews Corp. executive
Jonathan Tisch. Loews, controlled by Mr.
Tisch's father and uncle, sells Kent and
Newport cigarettes through its Lorillard
subsidiary.
Hazardous Path
Mr. Gore's aides say the vice president's
PAC won't accept donations from the
tobacco industry or its senior executives. And they characterize Mr. Tisch,
who runs the Loews hotel subsidiary, as a travel and tourism executive,
not a tobacco official. But his involvement in the vice president's fund
raising, like the mixed message on tobacco coming from DNC
headquarters, underscores the hazards of racing for the moral high ground
opposite an industry so thoroughly woven into the fabric of Washington's
money-soaked political culture.
Republicans say the Democrats' policy on tobacco money is easy to
explain. "That's posturing," says Deputy Senate Majority Leader Don
Nickles of Oklahoma. He singles out Mr. Gore, in particular, for
"hypocritical ... self-righteous, pat-yourself-on-the-back demagoguery."
Marla Romash, a spokesman for Mr. Gore's PAC, rejects such
Republican charges as "ridiculous," adding: "What they ought to do is exert
their energies to stop children from smoking." The vice president's stance
on industry donations and on tobacco legislation, she says, "goes back to
his personal commitment" to cut deaths and disease caused by smoking.
Trying to Forestall Criticism
Of course, some Republicans themselves are embracing the
public-relations advantages of donning a white hat on the tobacco-money
issue. Mr. Nickles, for instance, says he too has stopped taking tobacco
money -- not because there is anything wrong with it, but to forestall
criticism from political adversaries and the press after Majority Leader
Trent Lott of Mississippi asked him to help shape tobacco legislation. Sen.
John McCain of Arizona, sponsor of the main antitobacco legislation
moving through the Senate, and Rep. Michael Bilirakis of Florida, who is
chairman of a House health-care subcommittee, have sworn off tobacco
money for similar reasons. Most Republicans and their party committees,
however, continue to take tobacco money.
"It's not worth it," argues GOP
lobbyist Vin Weber, who accepted
tobacco money when he
represented Minnesota in the House
but now counsels other Republicans
not to. "Before this fall's election is
over, it's probably going to be an
issue that bites someone," adds Mr.
Weber, whose clients now include
the National Center for
Tobacco-Free Kids.
For reasons of pragmatism and
principle alike, it is mostly
Democrats who make a point of
trying to quit. The party of Jefferson
and the tobacco industry, once
locked in a mutually beneficial
embrace, have drifted apart for
years due to several factors: the
crumbling of the Democrats'
formerly solid Southern base, the rise of cultural liberalism among party
activists and, most recently, the GOP's surge to majority status on Capitol
Hill. Of the record $4.4 million in PAC and unlimited "soft money"
contributions that the industry handed out in 1997, four-fifths went to the
GOP, according to Common Cause, a self-described citizens lobby.
Possible Campaign Issue
As a result, the Democrats' swelling antitobacco faction nurtures the hope
of soon severing party ties to the industry altogether. "The Democratic
Party should be the tobacco-free party," insists first-term Sen. Richard
Durbin (D., Ill.). Indeed, party strategists are already signaling that they
intend to make the GOP's financial ties to the industry a major campaign
issue in their attempt to win back control of Congress.
Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle of South Dakota stopped
taking tobacco PAC contributions several years ago, and says that policy
is important as "a matter of public perception" amid the legislative debate
on smoking. House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri,
who hauled in some $117,000 in tobacco money for his own PAC and
House campaigns from 1987 to 1996, goes a step further: Not only has he
stopped accepting money from senior tobacco executives and PACs, but
he has also sworn off donations from nontobacco subsidiaries of tobacco
conglomerates. Thus, aides say Mr. Gephardt, a potential 2000
presidential candidate, won't take donations from executives at Miller
Brewing Co., a unit of Philip Morris Cos. -- even as he actively raises
money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which
accepts tobacco money.
To take industry donations is "like referees receiving funding [from one
side] before they ref a football game," argues Sen. Paul Wellstone (D.,
Minn.), another potential presidential candidate who also spurns tobacco
money.
Frost's View
Tobacco money has become so unfashionable in party circles that some
ambitious Democrats seem embarrassed to talk about taking it. Sens. Bob
Kerrey of Nebraska and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, chairman and
vice chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee,
respectively, both declined to discuss the committee's continued
acceptance of tobacco money. Their House-level counterpart, Mr. Frost,
says accepting industry donations -- like the $32,000 sent over by the
Tobacco Institute during the first quarter of this year -- fits the needs of "a
diverse party" that includes politicians from tobacco-producing states. "My
objective is to take back control of the U.S. House," says the Texas
lawmaker."
Certainly, their representatives remain part of the process here. The law
firm that includes Mr. Clinton's former Treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen,
for instance, earned $10 million lobbying for tobacco companies last year.
The advertising blitz recently launched by the industry to thwart
antitobacco legislation is being shaped by longtime Gore friend Carter
Eskew, who works for a prominent Washington public-relations firm.
When the vice president's wife, Tipper Gore, hosted Democratic women
at a March 1995 coffee at the Naval Observatory, among those invited
was then-Philip Morris executive Tina Flournoy; a DNC spokesman this
week first confirmed that Ms. Flournoy attended the coffee, then later
called back to say she didn't. In any case, the cigarette maker sent
$50,000 to the DNC about a week after the event. Ms. Flournoy, who
declined to be interviewed, later left Philip Morris for a job in the
Clinton-Gore campaign and today co-chairs the party's rules and bylaws
committee. Mr. Gore, too, declined to be interviewed.
The Democrats' stance is "all a bunch of hypocrisy," asserts Rep. John
Linder of Georgia, chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign
Committee. If antitobacco Democrats were sincere and not merely
seeking electoral advantage, he reasons, they would seek an outright
tobacco ban.
Not that he cares much for posturing by fellow Republicans, either. When
GOP candidates who refuse PAC contributions request financial help from
the committee, Mr. Linder observes wryly, "I send them tobacco money."
interactive2.wsj.com |
