WJR radio (Detroit)

WJR: The entire afternoon news center welcomes you to WJR; it's 20 minutes after 4 o'clock. The story that goes on and on, of course, the O.J. Simpson trial; another story we've been hearing about month after month after month, this Whitewater investigation; and a topic that we're going to talk about right now, although it could take a turn in the road in the next day or two, and it has to do with the issue of smoking, about tobacco lobbyists, and specifically about President Clinton's intervention in the matter. ABC White House correspondent Brit Hume is on the other end of our line this afternoon to talk about it. Good afternoon.

Brit Hume: Good afternoon.

WJR: What can we expect from the President? He's going down to address this Baptist Young People's convention in North Carolina, I believe. Is he going to drop -- light the powder keg, if you will?

Brit Hume: I don't think he's going to do that tomorrow. The White House is telling us today that while he's close to a decision on tobacco and particularly about smoking among youth, he will not be announcing that tomorrow, though he may have something general to say about the subject. He's clearly trying to find some action he can take that will be short of a major regulatory step, but which will appeal to the public at least as a real effort on his part to do something about teen smoking.

WJR: Yeah, Brit, what does -- what power, actually, does the President wield at this point, making changes?

Brit Hume: Well, he doesn't have a lot. The FDA would like him to declare nicotine at least, or tobacco, to be a drug, which would subject it to all kinds of regulation, but that would be such a major step that it could be met with everything up to and including court action by the tobacco industry and would tie it up indefinitely before it would take effect, so if he were to decide on that rather stern measure, he would have trouble getting it to go into effect right away, and he's already indicated publicly that he's looking to do something that, while it would have some mandatory element in it, that it would be chiefly aimed at teen smoking and would not be subejct to being tied up in litigation or delay. So it's not entirely clear what he will do, but you know, you have such things as tobacco being sold through machines, you have it being sold without identification, and there may be some action he can take short of moving to regulate it fully that will meet his criteria.

WJR: Brit, when you're dealing with as unbelievably powerful a lobby as the tobbaco lobby is, how far can the President go? And is it maybe just enough to put the threat out there to prompt the tobacco companies to maybe take action on their own, as Philip Morris has said it will do today?

Brit Hume: Well, it is, except that there have been so many of these cases in which the tobacco industry has said it will do one thing or another, and the President is in an interesting political situation because he would like to be able to take an action which the public would look at and say, Well there's a President doing something responsible about an issue we all care about, smoking among young people. At the same time, you have this core of people who live and work in the tobacco belt who are sensitive to this issue, and if he moved to do anything that was too strenuous or stern, that would make it very difficult for people in those areas to sympathize with or vote for him. So this President who is given to striking the middle course is clearly looking for something like that on this issue, and it's not entirely clear what it is, but it looks to me as if there may be more gesture than action in what he decides.

WJR: Yeah; I wonder how close to home this whole thing is hitting, too, you know; his teenage daughter Chelsea, she has friends, who knows? maybe she's even experimented just a little bit when the President and the First Lady have been away from her presence. Who knows what they may have found out, why he has suddenly taken this great interest in the problem of teen smoking?

Brit Hume: Well, I certainly think that's a possibility, but this is an issue that has a lot of sex appeal, a lot of controversy, and I think the President has been looking for ways, on a range of issues, the environment being one, threatened vetoes being another, executive orders that he can issue, to be somewhat less upstaged than he's been for most of this year by the new Republican-controlled Congress which has really dominated the Washington scene in a way that Congress has not done for many decades. And it has been a hard thing for this President, who came to office wishing to be an activist in the Roosevelt mode to be reduced to spectator in the third year of his Presidency, after his own major legislative initiative has failed and the other side has gotten control of the Congress. So he's looking for ways to seem, at least, to be doing things, and to some extent to be doing things.

WJR: Right, and besides, cigarette butts in the Lincoln bedroom are really so --

Brit Hume: So tacky, don't you think? And they smell, and they get in the curtains, and it's awful.

WJR: All right, Brit; well, we'll wait to see what the President has to say tomorrow. And Brit Hume, we'll talk again.

Brit Hume: Thanks.

WJR: Interesting article today by Alexander Volokh in the Wall Street Journal; he's a policy analyst with a group called the Reason Foundation, it's a public policy think tank in Los Angeles, and we got him on the line and poked his ideas a little bit and tried to find out maybe some suggestions on how we stop this surge in teen smoking.

Alexander Volokh: Have aggressive advertising campaigns, have aggressive public information campaigns, bring the message into the schools, bring the message home to parents that if they smoke around their children they might be setting a bad example, but I mean, do it through persuasion. And I think one reason that children smoke is because they see it as a kind of forbidden fruit activity, that they see that everyone is saying how bad it is, and so they do it as kind of part of their youthful rebellion, for the same reason that people did drugs in the '60s. So I think the more nagging we have on the subject, the more the adults of the country are starting to say that this is a decision that we do not think you can make, children will start to resent that kind of Puritanism and they're going to rebel against it. What we should be telling people is, Here's smoking; it's a legal thing, it's something which you should have the free choice to do, these are the health tradeoffs you're making, we think it's a really stupid health tradeoff to make. And if it's presented in rational terms, instead of in these kinds of adults-telling- children-"You-may-not-do-this" terms, then I think that'll have a greater effect.

WJR: Ah, but in high school do you remember seeing that pickled lung? Come in to school, and we heard all the health warnings as well, and how many of us picked up a cigarette for the first time, and fortunately many of us did not get hooked, but many of us did and are still smoking to this day. Stay tuned because we will be hearing more from the President and others on this very important issue.