WASHINGTON — 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.
