THE NEW POLITICAL SCAM: IT'S ALL FOR THE KIDS

ONCE UPON a time, a politician would promise to do anything -- abolish
taxes, hold back the tides, run over his grandmother -- in the name of the
``working man.'' Not anymore. Nowadays everything is done in the name of
``families'' or, better still, for ``children.''

From Iraq to gun control, from global warming to air bags, there is nary a
public policy issue that is not sold as a way to protect kids. Sure, gun
locks might save an adult or two. But the important thing is what they do
for the little ones.

Kiddiecentrism abounds because it works. And it works because it
sentimentalizes politics and because it flatters baby boomers recently
emerged from boundless adolescence to parenthood.

Where did this technique start? Hard to say, but it was perfected by Marian
Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund. She realized in the early
'70s that America had tired of the Great Society: ``When you talked about
poor people or black people, you faced a shrinking audience.'' What to do?
Recast the very same programs as kids programs. Who's against kids?

As Mickey Kaus pointed out in a devastating 1993 dissection of Edelmanism,
this political sleight-of-hand served to avoid substantive political
debate. Rather than debating, for example, whether welfare -- which after
all went to the mothers, not the children -- perpetuates a culture of
dependency that breeds misery for both mothers and children, welfare reform
was branded as evil for taking bread from the mouths of babes.

Now that welfare as we knew it has been successfully abolished -- over the
passionate opposition of Edelman, who prophesied that it would push
millions deeper into poverty -- you would think that the practice of
disguising policy choices as pro-or anti-kid might have suffered a setback.

If you think so, you haven't been following the tobacco debate. Read
President Clinton's anti-tobacco speech in Carrollton, Ky., last month. It
invoked children no less than 34 times in 21 minutes -- a new indoor
record.

Or consider the tobacco bill that passed the Senate Commerce Committee
19-1. Beyond a curb on advertising and a youth initiative, it includes a
$516 billion fine -- oops, ``fee'' -- paid from a $1.10 per pack tax hike,
plus full FDA regulation up to and including the power to ban nicotine, and
more fees (again paid to the government) for the right to export. All this,
you see, to save kids.

For kids? Nonsense. The whole point of the anti-tobacco movement is to get
everyone to stop smoking. The people huddled miserable, furtive and scorned
outside office buildings stealing a smoke are not kids. They are adults,
feeling the lash of today's fashionable Prohibition.

But the pols can't admit that the only possible logic of an anti-smoking
campaign is to strangle the industry that peddles the stuff. They can't
admit that the royal ransom being extorted from tobacco companies desperate
for liability relief is a way for a Democratic president to fund a wish
list of social programs and for a Republican Congress to get tax cuts.

So they say this is all for the kids.

Look. The two provisions in the commerce committee bill that will have the
greatest real effect on teen smoking -- the ad curb and the ``look-back''
measures that penalize Big Tobacco if youth smoking is not reduced --
require the voluntary cooperation of the companies. Congress has the power
to tax and gouge, but not to abridge free speech or hold companies
responsible for teen behavior. And on these two teen-sensitive provisions
the companies are willing to cooperate.

They also agreed in their June 1997 deal with the state attorneys general
to significant FDA regulation, a $369 billion fine and financial penalties
if youth smoking is not reduced by 50 percent within seven years. But the
Senate bill upped the ante to a half- trillion dollars -- and took away the
liability protection that the attorneys general had given the companies and
that had brought them to the bargaining table in the first place.

Of course, the companies were for years duplicitous purveyors of (a legal)
poison. Perhaps an exemplary criminal liability charge against a few
executives -- followed by a good public hanging -- will satisfy our
national craving for retribution. But the basic claim underlying civil
tobacco litigation -- that individual smokers were innocent victims,
unaware that tobacco was addictive and dangerous to their health -- is too
ridiculous to be allowed to clog up our judicial system, as it undoubtedly
will unless some liability relief is passed.

But it probably will not be passed. The politicians are not after a deal
but blood money, mountains of it. Consequently, there may be no tobacco
legislation at all this year. That is too bad. There is a compromise
waiting to be struck, that is if anybody is really doing this for the kids.

Charles Krauthammer is a Washington Post columnist.

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)