13 years on tobacco road

President Obama will soon finish a journey that President Clinton started in 1996.

In the summer of that presidential election year, Clinton announced his administration was planning to regulate tobacco using the authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

{mosads}The tobacco industry and many Republicans balked at the initiative, and it was challenged in the courts. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Congress needed to give the FDA the power to regulate.

Fast-forward nine years. Congress is now poised to pass legislation giving the FDA that authority, and Obama is looking forward to signing the bill.

It will be interesting to see if Clinton shows up at the signing ceremony. Even though the high court threw out the Clinton administration rule in 2000, Clinton benefited politically from the initiative.

The Clinton-Gore campaign launched ads against then-GOP nominee Bob Dole on tobacco.

“Bob Dole or Bill Clinton — who’s really protecting our children?” one ad stated at the time, showing children smoking cigarettes.

Of course, Dole did not support kids puffing away, but the political damage was done. The issue was a political winner for the Clinton-Gore campaign — and Dole didn’t help himself when he questioned whether smoking was addictive on the “Today” show.

Joe Lockhart, then the Clinton-Gore campaign press secretary, said, “We always thought that this would be a good issue for us, but we never thought it would get raised to the highest level.”

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) are the authors of the FDA tobacco legislation and have shown their persistence over the last 13 years.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) was a longtime critic of the legislation, but the bill is not nearly as controversial as it used to be, passing the House in April, 298-112, with 70 Republicans backing it.

Kennedy’s bill, meanwhile, has 57 co-sponsors, including Republicans.

The legislation would ban candy-flavored cigarettes and would seek to curb tobacco use by adolescents through restrictions on the sale and promotion of nicotine products.

Some opponents of the bill say that the Federal Trade Commission, not the FDA, should have authority over tobacco. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), for example, said FDA is not up to this “enormous and complex” task.

All bills have a story behind them, but the tobacco legislation’s tale is rich with campaign politics and countless hurdles that have been overcome.