Al Gore's nicotine fit

Editorial Copyright 1999 Washington Times July 25, 1999

Despite his high-minded, overheated diatribe directed against the tobacco industry at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, Vice President Al Gore has proven yet again that he is utterly incapable of shaking his own hypocritical tobacco habit. Not long after news broke that GOP front-runner George W. Bush's campaign issued the blockbuster announcement that the Texas governor had raised more than $36 million during the first six months of 1999, virtually double Mr. Gore's tally, Mr. Gore shook up his campaign staff by hiring Carter Eskew to be his campaign's message czar.

Call it a nicotine fit. Last year Mr. Eskew served as "Big Tobacco's" hit man. He personally directed the tobacco industry's $40 million advertising campaign that defeated the Clinton-Gore administration's tobacco-control legislation, which featured a whopping $500 billion tax increase. "Washington" (i.e., the Clinton-Gore White House and the Democratic Party) "has gone cuckoo again," one of Mr. Eskew's ads declared. Another accused "politicians in Washington" of "voting to destroy our way of life."

Referring to Mr. Eskew's handiwork, President Clinton, lamenting the defeat of the administration's anti-tobacco bill last year, declared, "No one doubts that this came about, in part, because of an unanswered $40 million advertising campaign by the tobacco companies." Bill Novelli of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids told The Washington Post, "Carter Eskew did a terrific job of harming the greatest piece of tobacco legislation ever to come down the pike."

At the Democratic convention the year before, Mr. Gore offered a radically different view of the tobacco industry from that of his new message czar. Mr. Gore held the tobacco industry responsible for the death of his older sister, who died of lung cancer in 1984, 20 years after the Surgeon General established the link between smoking and cancer. "Three thousand young people in America will start smoking tomorrow. One thousand of them will die a death not unlike my sister's," the vice president inveighed. "And that is why until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking. And that is also why I was intensely proud last week when President Clinton stood up for American families by standing up to tobacco advertising aimed at getting our children addicted."

Of course, it wasn't the first time Mr. Gore has displayed his seemingly limitless hypocrisy over tobacco. In his campaign for the presidency in 1988, Mr. Gore breathlessly bragged to North Carolina primary voters about his own experience with the deadly weed: "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands I put in the plant beds and transferred it! I've hoed it! I've chopped it! I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!" For his Senate campaign in 1990, six years after his sister's death, Mr. Gore gratefully accepted campaign contributions from the political action committees of Philip Morris, Brown and Williams Tobacco Corp., RJR/Nabisco and the Smokeless Tobacco Council. And the vice president acknowledges that for several years after his sister died he continued to cash annual checks from the proceeds of his family's tobacco farm.

Asked why he continued to accept political contributions from the tobacco industry and to profit from tobacco farming, both politically and financially, for years after his sister's death, Mr. Gore shamelessly replied, "It takes time to fully absorb the most important lessons of life." In fact, as Mr. Gore's hypocritical history with tobacco clearly demonstrates, his "most important lesson in life" is to do whatever it takes to smooth his path to the White House, no matter how often he must sacrifice whatever principles he claims to hold dear.

---

Comments on this posting?
Click here to post a public comment on the Trash Talk Bulletin Board.
Click here to send a private comment to the Junkman.