TOBACCO BILL DIES, BUT ISSUE THRIVES

WASHINGTON -- Tobacco began its new life as a campaign issue Thursday, with
both parties trying to exploit Wednesday's demise of tobacco legislation for
their own advantage.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who led the procedural
maneuvering that killed the tobacco bill, consulted with the White House and
Democratic leaders to see if a more modest attempt to fight youth smoking
could be salvaged.

Lott and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said they were contemplating a
narrower bill that would focus on punishing retailers who sell to children
and also would step up drug enforcement. The defeated tobacco bill would
have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes by $1.10 and would have
tightly regulated them, from how they are made to how they are sold.

The reason Republicans killed the bill, said Lott, was that it overreached.

``Now, if the president is serious about doing something about teenage
smoking, and hopefully drug abuse, we can do that. We can do that next week.
We could probably do it this afternoon,'' said Lott.

President Clinton was cautiously receptive.

``If that's a good-faith effort they're willing to make, that's certainly
one option that I would consider,'' Clinton said.

But the differences on approach between parties are vast. The tobacco bill's
core was the $1.10 price increase, which public-health experts said would
deter children from smoking. Clinton has said having at least that much of
an increase was mandatory for any bill he would sign.

How voters view tobacco is one of the wild cards that have made the tobacco
debate so tumultuous. Polls show the public thinks tobacco is a pressing
public-health problem but generally does not hold politicians responsible
for failing to devise solutions.

Clinton hopes to change that, and promised to raise the issue publicly
throughout the summer.

Republicans who voted to kill the bill ``may believe that the $40 million in
advertising by the tobacco companies changed public opinion irrevocably and
permanently and therefore it's safe to walk away from the biggest
public-health obligation that this country has today,'' he said. ``I don't
believe that.''

The tobacco industry's heavy advertising campaign is said to have given
Republicans cover to kill the bill.

The industry is ready to spend more, hinted Scott Williams, a tobacco
official. ``Clearly we will not allow critics to misinform people about the
issues,'' he said.

But Democrats were already testing potential campaign mottoes for this fall,
when a third of the Senate and all of the House are up for re-election.

The death of the tobacco bill and the GOP blocking of campaign-finance
reform, said Democratic House Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri, showed
``the synergy going on between Republican legislators and moneyed interests.''

Sen. Wendell Ford, D-Ky., concluded after a meeting with Lott and Sen. Tom
Daschle, D-S.D., the minority leader, that ``there's some Republicans that
are very concerned about their vote yesterday. And there's headlines in a
good many newspapers around the country, from Los Angeles east, that
Republicans killed the bill. So they're looking for some way to get out of it.''

The tobacco bill would have raised at least $516 billion for the government
over 25 years. Clinton had planned to use about $150 billion of it for his
child care initiatives and to hire more teachers. Its demise robs him of his
three top domestic priorities, all dealing with children: child health,
education and cutting youth smoking.

But the tobacco bill's end won't change the government's actual spending
plans much, because neither the House's nor the Senate's pending budget
plans accepted Clinton's proposals.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett