Huckabee about-face on smoking

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has reversed his position on a federal ban aimed at workplace smoking and now believes the issue should be addressed by state and local governments.

The about-face is apparent in a Huckabee campaign statement, sent to The Hill Tuesday evening in response to questions about the smoking ban proposal. It clashes with the stance Huckabee has taken during his race for the White House and with his record as governor of Arkansas, when he signed into law a measure prohibiting smoking in most indoor public places.

{mosads}At an August 2007 forum on cancer hosted by cyclist and activist Lance Armstrong and moderated by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Huckabee said he supported a federal smoking ban.

“If you are president in 2009 and Congress brings you a bill to outlaw smoking nationwide in public places, would you sign it?” Matthews asked.

 “I would, certainly would. In fact, I would, just like I did as governor of Arkansas, I think there should be no smoking in any indoor area where people have to work,” Huckabee responded, triggering applause from the crowd. Part of the interview has been posted on Youtube.com and viewed over 2,500 times.

Calling it a “workplace safety issue,” Huckabee added that the “same reason that we regulate that you can’t pour radon gas into a workplace is the same reason that we shouldn’t allow people to pour the toxic, noxious fumes of a cigarette into a place where people have to work.”

Huckabee’s campaign, however, is backtracking. In its statement to The Hill, the campaign stated, “At a Lance Armstrong cancer forum last August, Governor Huckabee said that if Congress presented him with legislation banning smoking in public places, he would sign it, because he would not oppose the overwhelming public support that such a congressional vote would reflect. However, since such sentiment for federal legislation doesn’t exist at this time, and since he has said that the responsibility for regulating smoking initially lies with the states, the governor believes that this issue is best addressed at the local and state levels.”

But at that same August event, Huckabee sought to take the lion’s share of the credit for the Arkansas law and argued that such an initiative would not be possible without the involvement of the executive.

“As a governor, I led our state to become the first state in the South to have a statewide ban on smoking anywhere indoors and I’m proud of that and it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get done,” Huckabee said. “It was hard.

And I’ll tell you something, Chris, it takes the personal involvement of the chief executive to make that happen,” he said.

Huckabee’s initial plan to enhance the federal government’s power to curb exposure to second-hand smoke predictably attracted criticism from conservatives.

But he wasn’t getting any cover from anti-smoking advocates, who said the federal approach favored by Huckabee would inevitably lead to weaker prohibitions than many state and local governments have already put into place. The American Lung Association, the American Cancer Society and other anti-smoking groups share this view, representatives said.

Some proponents of anti-smoking initiatives also said the Arkansas law is among the least stringent in the nation.
“We do not support federal legislation. This work is being addressed at the state and local level,” said Bronson Frick, the associate director of Americans for Nonsmokers Rights.

If Huckabee had pushed his anti-smoking agenda as president, he would have followed in the footsteps of another former Arkansas governor: former President Clinton.

Clinton attempted to ban smoking in the workplace during his first term in the White House. Following an uproar from industry groups, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration never finalized that plan. Clinton did, however, prohibit smoking in federal buildings in 1997.

Huckabee’s initial position on a smoking ban provided his opponents with fodder to pad their argument that the ex-governor lacks the conservative credentials to represent the GOP in the 2008 general election.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) chose tobacco-rich South Carolina as a staging ground to attack Huckabee on a smoking ban last week.

“He said he would sign a bill that would ban smoking nationwide. So much for federalism. So much for states’ rights. So much for individual rights,” Thompson said during a debate in Myrtle Beach.

Thompson is not the only conservative who has attacked Huckabee’s embrace of a smoking ban.

Conservative columnist George Will and American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene, a columnist for The Hill, each raised the smoking issue to criticize Huckabee, as have countless conservative and libertarian bloggers.

Huckabee signed other tobacco-related laws in Arkansas that  are unpopular with some conservatives, such as tax increases on cigarettes, cigars and cigarette rolling papers, as well as a law prohibiting smoking in an automobile carrying a child younger than 6 years old.

The former governor’s anti-smoking message has been seen as part of his message of promoting a healthy life style. Huckabee lost over 120 pounds over two years through diet and exercise. Huckabee has never smoked, according to a campaign aide.

The views of the other Republican candidates on a smoking ban are not entirely clear. The campaigns of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani did not respond to inquiries.

In 2004, Romney signed Massachusetts’ sweeping law that outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants but backing for that law does not necessarily signify support for a federal law.

Giuliani has made conflicting statements about his opinion of the workplace-smoking ban enacted in 2003 by his successor, Michael Bloomberg, according to news accounts.

On an Irish radio broadcast in 2003, Giuliani said, “I have seen how a total ban works in New York and I believe it is not the right way to go,” the Irish Examiner reported. The following day, however, The New York Times reported Bloomberg’s account of a telephone conversation between the two men in which Giuliani expressed his support for the New York City law.

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) support a national ban on workplace smoking, though Edwards has expressed reservations about the constitutionality of such a law.

Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) both said that federal action is not needed and would be ill advised, though Obama left open the possibility of federal action in the event efforts stall at the state and local level.

“I think we’re making progress at the local level,” Clinton said at a debate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in September. “If we can’t provide these kinds of protections at the local level, which would be my preference, I would be supportive of a national law,” Obama said.

Unlike the presidential candidates, anti-smoking advocates appear to be in agreement that federal action would threaten their cause. They maintain that the tobacco industry would be successful at influencing Congress to water down any ban and to preempt stronger state and local laws.

American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin summed up these views, saying, “We would love to see strong national legislation but increasingly it’s been demonstrated that’s very tough to get.”

“There’s no way to predict for certain what Congress would do,” said Matthew Myers, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The proliferation of smoking bans across the country has picked up considerably and advocates do not want to see their efforts interrupted. “There has been substantial progress at an increasing pace at the state and local level,” Myers noted.

More than 20 states, the District of Columbia and hundreds of municipalities have workplace smoking bans in effect, according to Americans for Nonsmokers Rights. Despite Huckabee’s claim that the Arkansas law bans smoking in all workplaces, there are exceptions, such as for restaurants and bars that only admit patrons who are at least 21 years old.