As if further proof were needed that the campaign for president has nothing to do with the task of being president, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are in a dispute over tobacco.
It's like hearing that the Mahatma Gandhi and Debbie Boone were caught fighting over a bottle of whiskey in the back of a church.Clinton smokes maybe six cigars a year. Mostly he chews on them because he is profoundly allergic to smoke. Dole, like most men of his generation, smoked for a time then cut it out, doubtless when he realized it didn't make him look like Sinatra after all.
For the most part, we are talking about men for whom tobacco was an ephemeral fancy. Theories of addiction collapse in the presence of their profound inability to stick with even a bad habit.
But Dole, chafing at Democratic attacks over campaign donations from big tobacco (when you want to demonize an industry, put "big" in front of it) got into an argument with Katie Couric on "The Today Show." Getting into a fight with Katie Couric is like getting into a pie-throwing contest with the queen. What caused the argument is destined to be far less interesting than the fact that the fight took place at all, and the national IQ is unlikely to rise as a result.
In the course of this set-to, Dole cornered himself into suggesting that:
1. Cigarettes are not necessarily addictive.
2. C. Everett Koop, former Reagan-era surgeon general and anti-tobacco crusader, might have been brainwashed by the anti-tobacco media.
Let's take these assertions one at a time. Cigarettes might not be addictive. And my mother, a pack-a-day smoker her entire, truncated adult life, might not be dead of heart disease. And that hump on Joe Camel's back might really be a tumor.
Dole's remark about addiction and tobacco is the result of momentary headiness in the face of a pack of Kentuckians a few weeks back. On friendly turf, he played to the crowd by suggesting one of its big cash crops might not be addictive. This was ill-advised, but not an exclusively Republican error. Al Gore didn't drop the tobacco crop on his Tennessee farm until his sister died of cancer.
As to whether Dr. Koop has been brainwashed, let us consider the use of this word. It was costly to George Romney in 1968, when the Republican presidential hopeful returned from an overseas tour of Vietnam and announced he was now opposed to continuing the war there. Why the change of position? Romney said he had been brainwashed into supporting the war. Voters ditched him like a lit Marlboro in the boys' room when the principal walks in.
Nobody really believed Romney had been held in a cell and subjected to hypnotic abuses by communist soldiers. Romney basically was saying he'd been the victim of bad information.
Saying you've been wrong about an important issue rarely pays off in politics. And that's what Dole was saying about Koop - that the man had bad information. Dole is wrong, but answering affirmatively to Couric's question about whether Koop has been brainwashed is hardly worth the overwrought responses we've been hearing.
So why the big fuss over tobacco? Well, Republicans of late have been accepting donations from the tobacco industry. The Democrats, much like the police chief in "Casablanca," are shocked, shocked, to discover this happening.
All this outrage proves is that, in addition to the lungs, tobacco appears to be bad for the memory. Scotch should be aged for as long as the Democrats have taken tobacco loot. All that has changed is the ratio. In the past 10 years, the Republicans have overtaken the Democrats in luring in tobacco money and suddenly the Democrats start sounding like, well, C. Everett Koop. Suddenly, the Democrats are sending "Buttman" into Dole rallies. Now the Republicans are threatening to send their own version, "Joint Man," to Clinton gatherings.
Now, let us get down to the question of what all this has to do with being president. Here's the answer:
Nothing.