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80 6 Victory and Accountability Within ten days of the House vote, articles in the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post documented MCI’s unprecedented visibility and power. Three veteran political analysts who had closely followed the initiative reflected on the changed political environment—to DeMarco’s delight (and not without his influence). On April 1, 1999, the Sun’s C. Fraser Smith, his early skepticism abating, wrote a column headlined “Tobacco’s Lobby Wilting as Grass Roots Reach Deep; In Annapolis, Power Shifts toward $1 Boost in Cigarette Tax.”On April 6,the Washington Post ran a story and analysis by Saundra Torry and Daniel LeDuc: “Tobacco Battle Too Close to Call; Smoking Foes Show Muscle in Assembly Fight over Tax Hike.” The journalists could not resist the obvious metaphor. The Sun’s Smith: “After years of supremacy in the General Assembly,lobbyists for the Goliath of Big Tobacco could be felled this year by the David of grass-roots opposition.” The Washington Post’s Torry and LeDuc: “No longer a midget flinging itself against Big Tobacco, the anti-smoking movement has grown increasingly sophisticated in Maryland, where it has built a broad network of supporters, flexed its election-year muscles and spent $300,000 on a television and radio campaign in recent weeks.” Still, the vote in the House had been close, and some of the pledge makers shaky.The Senate,under the iron hand of Mike Miller,had all along posed the main obstacle. The Senate In the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee,the Glendening political juggernaut ran head-on into Mike Miller. The collision prompted a scathing April 7 editorial in the Post that called upon legislators to keep focused on Victory and Accountability 81 “the difference between a serious move to discourage smoking and a cave-in to tobacco interests seeking a pointlessly weak increase or no bill at all” and suggested that “members of the committee who give serious thought” to the “costly damages of smoking”ought to“see the proposal into law.” During hearings on the tax increase, committee chair Barbara Hoffman indulged in one light moment that signaled a change of atmosphere in the Senate, where lobbyist Bruce Bereano had long held power. Now won over by DeMarco’s concession not to mandate the allocation of the tax proceeds,“she was now very much on our side,” DeMarco says. “Proponents present their case first, and she gave us lots of time.” Bereano, scheduled to be the first witness for the opposition, had to get back to the halfway house where he had been confined following his criminal conviction for political funding abuses. With time running out, he had just scurried out of the hearing room as Hoffman began calling the opposition witnesses.“When she called up Bruce Bereano ,” says DeMarco, “somebody else came up to testify. ‘Where is Mr. Bereano ?’ she asked, feigning innocence. The witness answered sheepishly,‘He had a previous engagement.’And everybody knew where, and the room burst into howls of laughter.” Yet Hoffman had to struggle mightily to come up with a seven-vote majority to get a tax increase—any tax increase—out of her committee.The campaign was on the brink of failure, just as in 1997. As the April 8 vote of the committee loomed, DeMarco ally Chris Van Hollen and Hoffman had nailed down only six votes.The holdout was Senator Gloria Lawlah of Prince George’s County,a profile in ambivalence. Lawlah“recently received a stack of preprinted cards from tax opponents, but those aren’t on her mind as decision time nears,”reported Washington Post writers Torry and LeDuc in their April 6 story. The governor, pressing her for support, she said, had asked her, “‘what are you really interested in?’ I said, ‘Governor, I’ve always been interested in Rosecroft,’” a raceway that had long been an economic mainstay of Lawlah’s impoverished district.The article went on: “Last week, the governor announced plans to provide $10 million to bolster purses for the harness track at Rosecroft and at Maryland’s thoroughbred tracks.”But Lawlah still held out,feeling“tugged in the opposite direction.Sitting in the empty Senate chamber Friday, she looked toward the chair from which Senate President Miller presides” and told the reporters,“‘Mike Miller is responsible for me being in leadership. I want to see what Mike wants.’ . .. ‘He holds the key.’” Lawlah paid little attention to the editorials from the Sun or the Post or others...

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