Failed Tobacco Bill Illustrates McCain’s Leadership Style

Senate Republicans were in a quandary: A powerful Senate committee had overwhelmingly approved a bill to crack down on teen smoking and raise cigarette taxes, moves attracting strong political support. But influential Republicans despised the measure.

As GOP senators met over lunch one day to plot their course, it was a seminal moment for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had worked hard to produce the bill and was laboring to rally his party behind it.

But his fabled temper boiled as GOP opponents derided the tobacco bill by posting a flow chart purported to show the byzantine bureaucracy the bill would create. “That’s a chicken s--- chart!” McCain snapped dismissively, according to sources at the meeting. His colleagues, used to the soothing cadences of senatorial politesse, bristled at the invective.

McCain later tried to defend the measure at the lunch, but the damage was done. The hemorrhaging of GOP support continued, and the bill soon died.

McCain’s unsuccessful 1998 fight for landmark anti-tobacco legislation--one of the most ambitious bills he has championed in his 17-year career in Congress--provides a glimpse of what kind of leadership he might exercise if he wins his quest for the presidency. Indeed, the saga of the tobacco bill was vintage McCain: taking on his party leaders (sometimes tactlessly), tilting at special interests, but coming up empty-handed.

In some ways, the bill’s fate fortifies the argument of his chief rival for the GOP presidential nomination--Texas Gov. George W. Bush--that McCain is a reformer without results, a politician who knows how to plant the flag for an issue but can’t close the deal.

But a closer look at how McCain, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, led the charge for the anti-tobacco bill provides a more nuanced view of how he operates. While McCain has a reputation as a maverick whose style grates many fellow senators, on the tobacco issue he managed to produce bipartisan committee backing for an extraordinarily complex, controversial bill. He eagerly embraced the cause even though he had no background with it, showing some of the agility a president needs to handle the multitude of matters thrust upon him.

The fact that the bill fell apart on the Senate floor reflects, in part, the limits of McCain’s legislative skills. But the forces arrayed against the measure were so vast that it may have been impossible for even the most deft back-room dealer to manage.

McCain Tends to Look at the Big Picture

That points to the signature feature of McCain’s style of leadership: He is temperamentally inclined to choose sweeping goals that many see as doomed from the start. While most of his colleagues pursue incremental, achievable legislative aims, McCain gravitates to the quixotic. Along with the tobacco bill, the marquee examples of this tendency have been his push for campaign finance reform (the key plank of his presidential campaign) and his fight against pork-barrel spending.

To be sure, as chairman of the Commerce Committee--a panel with jurisdiction over such issues as telecommunications and transportation--McCain has overseen and shepherded into law several bills important to business, including a 1999 measure to limit legal liability arising from glitches related to the Y2K computer bug.

In 1997, he effectively used his post to persuade television networks to develop a voluntary rating system for programs, in exchange for an agreement that Congress would not legislate on the matter for three years. He also was a leading sponsor of the measure that gave the president the authority to delete individual items in spending and tax bills passed by Congress (this power, known as the line-item veto, ultimately was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court).

But the main thrust of McCain’s presidential campaign is built not around the bills he has gotten through Congress but the causes he has lost there.

McCain’s failed fight for the anti-tobacco bill has come back to haunt him during his presidential campaign, with the pro-tobacco National Smokers Alliance running ads against him. But McCain has greeted the ad attack with characteristic bravado. “Come on down, you jerks,” he recently said. “You’re the guys who addicted our children.”

Anti-tobacco sentiment seemed to be surging when the issue first surfaced on Capitol Hill. The demand for legislative action was forced upon Congress in June 1997, after a group of state attorneys general reached a settlement with cigarette manufacturers that required congressional approval to be enforced. The settlement would provide limited liability protection for the industry in exchange for the companies paying $368.5 billion over 25 years for programs to reduce teenage smoking and help fund smoking-related health costs incurred by the states.

McCain was not the automatic choice to spearhead the legislation to implement the settlement. The assignment was thrust upon him by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who resolved competing claims by sending the whole matter to the Commerce Committee.

McCain was a newcomer to the tobacco fight, but he jumped in feet first with a series of hearings. Before long, he became a convert to the anti-tobacco cause with the same zeal he has brought to campaign finance reform.

“He had a job to do as chairman--that’s how it began,” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a committee member who worked closely with McCain. “But he got into it. He came to believe very deeply that this was a noble effort.”

The legislation began to evolve at a time when Congress and the White House were almost paralyzed by the scandal surrounding President Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. Nonetheless, McCain worked with administration officials in drafting the measure. It was typical of McCain, who is more willing than many in the GOP to reach across party lines.

“He was a real ally,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s chief domestic policy advisor. “We were able to work together across party lines in the midst of a bitterly partisan year.”

Working With Differing Groups

Crafting the bill required grueling negotiations among many competing interests. But on McCain’s watch, it went far beyond what the original $368-billion legal settlement required. McCain’s bill added $28.5 billion in economic aid to tobacco farmers, scaled back the liability protections the industry sought and increased their payments for legal claims and anti-smoking measures to $516 billion.

“For a guy with a reputation as a maverick, not sensitive to other members, he really was masterful at trying to bring together disparate interests in the face of really difficult situations,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

And to the amazement of many, the Commerce Committee--then composed of 11 Republicans and 9 Democrats--approved the bill by a 19-to-1 vote, with only one conservative GOP senator dissenting.

The lopsided vote, however, overstated the consensus behind the bill. Some members simply wanted to get the measure to the Senate floor, where major issues were left to be resolved. “Everybody on that [committee] had some concern with it,” said John Raidt, a top McCain aide.

The tobacco industry mobilized fierce opposition to the bill, spending about $40 million on a national advertising campaign to kill it.

GOP opposition also grew, with Assistant Senate Majority Leader Don Nickles (R-Okla.) leading the charge. Republican critics sought to recast the bill as an enormous tax hike that would add stifling layers of federal regulation and bureaucracy.

The bill would have raised the price of cigarettes by $1.10 a pack over five years. It also would have substantially increased financial penalties that the original settlement imposed on tobacco companies if targets were not met for reducing youth smoking. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), a close friend of McCain’s who bitterly opposed the tobacco bill, said the Arizona senator stubbornly pushed the bill in part because he was a prisoner of his pride of authorship. “John got committed to his product,” said Gramm. “It was his baby. He thought it was prettier, but it was an ugly baby to me.”

But McCain’s supporters viewed his persistence as a laudable example of his determination and drive. “Another committee chairman might have given up,” said Marshall Wittmann, a conservative policy analyst who is advising McCain’s campaign. “McCain just redoubled his efforts.”

It was clear the bill was in trouble when it came to the Senate floor in May 1998, but McCain opened debate in characteristic high dudgeon, lambasting the tobacco industry.

“They have sacrificed the truth and our children to their greed,” McCain said. “They have lied because lying has been profitable . . . because lying worked. No more. No more. The lying stops today.”

McCain urged that the bill be kept free of amendments that might upset his committee’s fragile compromise. But his pleas were ignored. Republicans added unrelated tax cuts and anti-drug amendments. Public health interests pushed for changes to make the bill even tougher on the tobacco industry, including an amendment to strip away all legal protections for the industry.

The unwieldy debate fueled critics’ charges that the bill had reached far beyond its original mission of implementing the tobacco settlement and curbing teen smoking. Finally, after a month of seeing McCain’s compromise shredded, Lott and other GOP leaders derailed the bill.

McCain Faced Tough Odds

Raidt argues that pressures from both sides of the issue conspired against McCain. “There were Democrats who wanted this bill to go down because they wanted to keep tobacco as a political issue,” said Raidt. “There were Republicans who wanted it to go down because they didn’t want to endanger the gravy train” of tobacco industry contributions to the GOP.

Some McCain critics argue that a more modest bill could have passed. “If he would have had a simple tax increase and some programs to reduce youth smoking, he probably would have gotten it through,” said Nickles.

But that would have required a retreat to a more incremental approach that is more in keeping with the deal-making mode of legislators such as former Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

“The tobacco bill was just audacious,” said Burdett Loomis, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. “Bob Dole wouldn’t have planted that flag. But he might have engineered a smaller deal.”

Still, Dole’s failed 1996 White House campaign showed to some analysts that the skills that make a good legislator do not necessarily make a good presidential candidate. Said Loomis: “The very reason someone like Bush might criticize John McCain--he’s not known as one of the legislative heavy hitters--that may be a reason why McCain might make a pretty good president. The best legislators simply do not have the temperament to run for president.”

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Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin contributed to this story.