ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 24, 1996 TAG: 9606240030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
"TO SOME people, smoking is addictive; to others, they can take it or leave it," said Bob Dole at a recent tobacco-country campaign stop in Winston-Salem.
Thanks, we'll leave it. We'll also do without the tobacco-information handout that the Dole campaign produced, then had to take back because it was a gross distortion.
The GOP presidential candidate had come under fire for his attempts, in Kentucky and North Carolina, to butter up to the tobacco industry by questioning whether smoking is necessarily addictive.
In a Saturday radio talk, President Clinton said: "When political leaders parrot the tobacco company line," they serve the interests of the powerful, not of American families.
Whereupon the Dole campaign, to rebut this criticism, distributed a handout that quoted a 1992 television interview with Vice President Al Gore.
Here's the Gore quote as it appeared in the Dole handout:
"There is no proven link between smoking and lung cancer and if you look closely at the scientific data, you have to admit that there are uncertainties."
Which makes the Clinton team's anti-tobacco rhetoric look pretty foolish, no?
No. Here's the context from which the Gore quote was lifted:
Tobacco company scientists, said the vice president, "will claim with a straight face that there is no proven link between smoking and lung cancer and if you look closely at the scientific data you have to admit that there are uncertainties.
"We don't know exactly how smoking causes lung cancer, but the weight of evidence accepted by the overwhelming preponderance of scientists is, yes, smoking does cause lung cancer and so we act on that knowledge from the scientific community."
A somewhat different spin, yes?
"Tobacco has always had a special place in the politics of America," observed Rep. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the other day, after the House of Representatives rejected his effort to end government-subsidized crop insurance and technical assistance for tobacco growers.
One manifestation of this special place is the tendency of many politicians - including Virginia lawmakers who preserve the lowest state cigarette tax in the nation - to turn their heads from the fact that tobacco kills more than 400,000 Americans every year.
Still fuming about the Dole campaign's distortion, Gore isn't turning away. "About the only people who don't believe nicotine is addictive or that smoking causes lung cancer are politicians who are addicted to tobacco money," he said last week in Philadelphia.
Gore presumably was referring to Big Tobacco's political largess - $4.1 million in campaign gifts last year alone, $3.2 million of which went to Republicans.
But that's probably not the only source of the vice president's outrage. Gore, after all, knows something about lung cancer. His sister died of it.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB