I have touched upon this premise in another recent thread because I think the Democratic Party is making a colossal tactical mistake by vocally portraying smokers as filthy pigs. I realize this issue doesn't break completely down party lines, but by and large, the partisan divide is fairly obvious. A couple of weeks ago on "The McLaughlin Group," liberal pundits Lawrence O'Donnell and Eleanor Clift couldn't say enough nasty and demeaning things about smokers when the moderator raised the topic of smoking bans, while conservatives Tony Blankley and Pat Buchanan came down the side of property rights and personal freedoms. Similarly, most U.S. states are perenially looking at regressive supersized tobacco tax hikes as a means to fill revenue holes. With rare exception, the Democrats argue in favor of the taxes, while Republicans argue in favor of allowing disproportionately low-income smokers to save hundreds of dollars per year. If I was a smoker, I'd have a hard time embracing Eleanor Clift, Lawrence O'Donnell and Tom Vilsack (among many others) as my friends and/or political soulmates.....
In America today, it may seem as though there is little political advantage defending smokers, but I submit that an aggressive push by the Republican Party to stage an organized appeal to smokers would prove to be a political masterstroke, even if they took a beating in the short-term by the media and anti-tobacco forces. George Will had a very telling column this weekend that illuminates the potential this issue has for conservatives if they simply get past the political correctness and tell the truth about the litany of misinformation and demagoguery that are successfully being employed by the insurance industry and revenue-hungry governments at every level.
Smokers are disproportionately white and working-class....the very people already trending to the GOP because of the culture war. This is just one more way for the Republican Party to show the coal miners, steelworkers, construction workers, waitresses and store clerks that they "connect with them culturally" as the Democrats look down their noses at them and order them to pay hundreds of dollars in additional taxes every year even as the rich folks across the tracks get their taxes cut. This is good politics....just as its good politics for the GOP to defend militant gun owners. Sure, NRA ideologues are a political minority, but the issue is of major personal relevance to them while it's a second or third-tier issue for the soccer moms who nominally support gun control laws. Even if 70% of the public disagreed with a hypothetical Republican Party initiative to stand up for smokers, it would be most likely to influence the voting patterns of the 30% who did agree with it.
Beyond this rudimentary tactical benefit, the economics of this issue also plays right into GOP hands. As George Will said in so many words, the tobacco companies of yesterday are the state and federal governments of today...fattening their own personal fortunes based on the deadly and addictive habits of the vulnerable. All of the hyperbole about the "evil tobacco companies" can just as easily apply now to New York City, among many other locales who have calculated ways to increase cash flow through the public's consumption of a lethal product. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of revenue was taken in last year because of tobacco taxes, a higher margin of profit than the "predatory" tobacco companies ever made in a single year.
Top among the list of government deceptions that ultimately lead to higher and higher cigarette taxes is the need to "offset the cost of smoking on society". At least as this premise applies to the government, it's totally false. Governments SAVE billions of dollars every year due to the premature deaths of smokers. If every American smoked a pack a day, there wouldn't even be talk of any need to reform Social Security or Medicare. They'd be indefinitely solvent. Indeed, as more Americans give up the smoking habit, costs of government will accelerate even beyond current worrisome projections. Certainly this is a morbid and politically incorrect talking point, but it also happens to be true. Seeing as how smokers know the risks and continue to smoke anyway, hearing such an argument spoken by a politician would be far more likely to illicit their cheers rather than their contempt, especially if it increased their chances of saving $300 a year on tobacco taxes. And sure, most Americans would gasp in disgust at any politician who spoke this morbid truth aloud, but they'd forget all about it in a week and base their vote on other issues when they went to the polls. The smokers, on the other hand, would be more inclined to remember it and vote for the person looking to save them money.
Lastly, the GOP could make serious headway even among non-smokers by turning this into a national security issue. One of the best-kept secrets in America today is that tobacco smuggling has become the number one source of funding for terrorists. Why bother with the illegal drug trade or money-laundering through African diamonds when all one has to do is fill up a semi full of $20 per carton Marlboros in North Carolina and truck them up to New York City to sell on the black market? One weekend's work yields a half million dollars that can then be used to plot future attacks against America. By pricing cigarettes so far beyond their market value, it has a similar effect as a prohibition. A criminal underworld develops and flourishes...and the organized legions of criminals who participate in the black market reap huge profits for their own pet causes. In other words, Michael Bloomberg's post 9/11 revenue-building scheme (a massive local tax on cigarettes) has the tremendous potential of ultimately financing the next terrorist attack against his city.
There are enough ripples in the conservative media (the aforementioned George Will, the Washington Times) to where the Republican Party will at some point recognize the potential gold mine a "defending smokers" strategy could yield, political correctness be damned. My desperate hope is that Democrats haven't sunk so far into Lawrence O'Donnell-esque smoker-loathing territory that they won't be able to effectively respond when the time comes.