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176 25 Things Fall Apart—the Center Cannot Hold Clinton’s principles and the choreographed White House ceremony tiptoed silently around the gargantuan issue of liability concessions to the industry, allowing both anti-immunity firebrands and public health– firsters to read support for their position into the presidential vacuum. But Clinton was not quite silent. When he met with the press after the ceremony, a member of the White House Press Corps asked him this obvious question: Mr. President, you haven’t said what you’re willing to do for the tobacco industry. Are you willing to agree to immunity from future liability? The president: Well, I don’t think they’ve asked for [immunity from] future liability. I think they’ve asked for immunity from liability for past suits. And the question there would be, what are they willing to agree to? They need to come and meet with us. We need to discuss it, and we need to see whether we can embody these five principles. These are the things I’m interested in. That was apostasy enough for Stan Glantz. Within a week following the issuance of the Clinton principles, Glantz had returned to the warpath. He sent the following e-mail message: “When I wrote the note that I sent around immediately after Clinton’s statement, I had not yet learned that the administration was willing to cave on liability .” Ralph Nader went on high alert even quicker. He immediately labeled Clinton’s statement “a half-hearted attempt to fix a fundamentally flawed deal.” Nader was certain Clinton was prepared to give the industry “effective” immunity if the industry agreed “to restore FDA authority and hike the penalties for company failure to reduce teen smoking.” And this he dismissed scornfully: “The United States does not engage in horse trading with drug dealers, and it should not be cutting deals with the tobacco pushers.” The Rise and Fall of the McCain Bill 177 But C. Everett Koop and David Kessler held their fire. Kessler had drawn Matt aside, standing out in front of the White House following the meeting with the president. He exhorted Matt that it was time to bring people together. Kessler felt strongly that to be effective, there needed to be a new coalition marching together under the banner of the Clinton principles. He told Matt he saw this as an opportunity for the two of them to join forces and work together again. Matt readily agreed and told Kessler that a group of organizations had already been working informally together to support a strengthened settlement, and that he would take David’s message to them. The next day, the groups Matt had been working with convened and drafted a set of principles—mirroring the Clinton principles—around which they would organize the new coalition. They chose the name ENACT and prepared to announce that all the groups were rallying behind Clinton. They focused, as did Clinton, on the public health issues, choosing, as did Clinton, to say nothing about liability. Matt explains the group’s thinking on this: There were multiple reasons. The most simple was that the public health groups in the room agreed on the public health issues, but the liability issues were beyond many of the organizations’ expertise. The different organizations were struggling with what was the right thing to do and didn’t know the answer. Although none of the groups were absolutist on the issue of liability, there would have been different positions on where to draw the line. Some also wanted to try to avoid further fighting with Drs. Koop and Kessler. We all hoped that the decision not to make liability an issue in our statement of principles would reduce the potential for divisiveness. So if we were going to hold the coalition together, we needed to focus on that on which we agreed. And that’s what we tried to say. Second, any liability statement we would have made probably would have been short of an absolute statement of “no concessions on liability.” The settlement drew the lines wrong and was flawed, and we would oppose it as drafted, but we also needed to signal potential allies on the Hill that we understood that there would have to be hard decisions made for legislation to pass and we were prepared to be part of that debate. We wanted to push the envelope, but we also wanted to be realistic and communicate to potential leaders on...

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