Clinton Recharges Teen Smoking Fight

Five days after Congress rejected a sweeping antismoking bill, President Clinton left Washington on Monday and started using the defeat of the legislation as a political weapon to wound the reputations of GOP congressional leaders and goad them into action.

In the first of a series of executive actions to cut teen smoking, Clinton ordered the government to track which brands of cigarettes teens smoke most and use the information to expose tactics that the tobacco industry uses to woo young smokers.

Speaking at a forum on family health care, Clinton, who knows well the power of money and advertising in politics, expressed his ire over the fact that tobacco companies had run an “unanswered $40-million ad campaign” that helped kill the legislation.

Studying the brands teens smoke is his way of using the bully pulpit of the White House and his executive powers to help counter that campaign and at the same time increase the political cost for Republicans who defeated the measure.

“It was a brazen act of putting politics over people and partisanship over progress,” he told a Nashville conference on family issues organized by Vice President Al Gore.

By surveying which cigarettes people 12 to 17 years old smoke, the administration hopes to find out what marketing techniques or other factors draw children to smoking and then fight them. Just as it put Joe Camel in a negative spotlight, the administration will focus on the companies that appear to have courted teen smokers most extensively, despite their pledge to cut teen smoking.

“The public pressure is going to be overwhelming,” said Chris Jennings, Clinton’s health care advisor.

Underage smoking is on the rise, even though it is illegal to sell cigarettes to teens. Clinton made the antismoking bill a domestic priority, embracing the legislation as an effort to curb smoking and fund various social programs. Among other things, the legislation would have raised the price of cigarettes by $1.10 per pack over five years.

Congressional Republicans have said that they will try to gain support for a scaled-down measure to fight teen smoking. But the White House and congressional Democrats are determined to make Republicans who voted against the broader legislation suffer as much political pain as possible, particularly with midterm elections coming in November.

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“The congressional leadership seems willing to walk away from its obligation to our children, but this issue is too important to walk away,” Clinton said before leaving the White House for the day’s trip to Nashville. “We’ll continue to move forward on every possible front to protect children.”

The antismoking legislation called for a similar study and stiff penalties for the tobacco industry if underage smoking does not decline. Clinton said he hopes expanding the research on teen smoking will pressure Congress to enact penalties even without the rest of the bill limiting the industry’s liability. In the meantime, the survey research will provide useful information to parents, public health professionals and architects of future public policy, he said.

“If you have an annual survey that shows a substantial difference in brand preference among young people, then it will clearly demonstrate that there is something in the nature of the advertising that has something to do with this,” Clinton said.

But Clinton held out hope that a full-fledged antitobacco bill still is possible. In Nashville, he called on the health care professionals, educators and officials gathered at the conference to put pressure on Congress to pass such a measure before the end of the session.

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The president, Gore and their wives were all in Nashville for the seventh annual Gore Family Re-union, an issues conference that this year focused on family health.

Clinton used the event to draw attention to other family-friendly health care initiatives.

He signed an executive order directing eight federal government agencies to undertake an ambitious drive to sign up millions of children who are eligible for Medicaid health insurance. Currently, 4.7 million children who are eligible for Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for children in low-income families, do not get coverage and, studies show, their health suffers as a result.

And he unveiled health initiatives for the elderly, including a new Internet Web page to provide up-to-date information on Medicare options in communities nationwide--www.medicare.gov--and new Medicare coverage, starting July 1, for diabetes education and bone mass measurement tests to detect osteoporosis.