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Non-Tech : Philip Morris - A Stock For Wealth Or Poverty (MO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Duncan who wrote (1823)	6/17/1998 7:43:00 PM
From: Xpiderman	Respond to of 6439

Losers failed to keep the bill alive in the GOP-controlled Senate, ending a four-week battle, and blamed tobacco ad blitz may have turned the tide. In the climax to a fierce, four-week struggle on the Senate floor, supporters of the measure failed on two successive votes to gain the 60 votes needed to keep the bill alive. Several Democrats vowed to force the issue back onto the Senate floor before the November elections, and said Republicans were merely doing the bidding of Big Tobacco. Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi countered for Republicans who argued that the measure had become a big government, ''tax and spend'' bill. ''We've lost sight of the original noble cause of just dealing with teen-age smoking and drug abuse,'' he said. It was a defeat for Clinton and the public health groups that had sought to give the government the power to regulate nicotine and take other steps to rein in the tobacco industry. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said he would try to revive some form of tobacco legislation, but only a bill ''that is narrowly focused on teen smoking.'' ''Our goal is to reduce teen smoking, not increase taxes,'' said Gingrich said in a statement. It was a remarkable triumph for Big Tobacco, an industry that fares poorly at the polls but that invested tens of millions of dollars on an advertising campaign to sink the bill. Many of the arguments contained in those ads advanced the same arguments that Republican critics have been making on the Senate floor. Tobacco companies walked away from the bill when it was expanded beyond what they had agreed to with the states. ''Three thousand kids a day will take up smoking,'' added Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. ''One thousand of them will die prematurely.'' Republicans said the truth was different, that they, too, favor cracking down on teen smoking, but that the bill had gotten out of hand. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who doubles as chairman of the Senate GOP campaign committee, also said he believed Republican incumbents had cast votes that would make it tough for their opponents to depict them as puppets of the tobacco industry. Among them, he said, was the vote to delete the limited protection from lawsuits that had been in the bill when it reached the Senate floor. On the first vote, 43 Democrats and 14 Republicans voted to choke off debate, while 40 Republicans and two Democrats were opposed. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., recovering from recent heart surgery, was the only senator not voting.