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1. Rescuing a Lost Cause
- Vanderbilt University Press
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9 1 Rescuing a Lost Cause A Tobacco Lobbyist’s Dream Maryland is a tobacco state—a historic tobacco state, if not a Big Tobacco state. Carved tobacco leaves adorn the balcony railing in Maryland’s historic Old Senate Chamber. When the State House was built in the 1770s, tobacco was a form of currency as well as Maryland’s major crop. The Great Seal of Calvert County (via Lord Calvert), adopted officially in 1954, features a tobacco leaf, representing the county’s leading product. In 2007, the seventysecond Queen Nicotina, selected from local outstanding high school seniors, reigned over the annual Charles County Fair. But despite the state’s tobacco history, from 1992 to 1996, Maryland public health advocates under the umbrella of the Smoke Free Maryland Coalition campaigned to raise the state’s thirty-six-cents-per-pack cigarette tax by one dollar. Each year the legislature slammed the door shut on any cigarette tax increase. In 1997, when the coalition tried again, Maryland had barely more than a thousand tobacco farmers. But those farmers and wholesalers from rural southern Maryland had long held the fierce loyalty of the state Senate president, Mike Miller, who vigorously opposed all constraints on tobacco because ,he often said,he was raised“surrounded by tobacco fields.” Along with Miller, the tobacco farmers and wholesalers could count on powerful senior legislators from neighboring tobacco-growing districts. From non-tobacco-growing districts, they could count on state legislators who depended on the goodwill of Miller for their rise through the Senate’s hierarchy —or who dreaded finding themselves with dead-end committee assignments , no help for a needed bridge or repaved road in their district, and a windowless Senate office in Annapolis, perhaps in the basement of what later was to be immortalized as“the Mike Miller Building.” Outside the legislature, but intimately connected to it, was Bruce Bereano, 10 The DeMarco Factor the veritable dean of Maryland’s lobbying corps. A lobbyist for the Tobacco Institute for more than twenty years, Bereano had served as chief of staff to Steny Hoyer (who became Democratic majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006) when Hoyer was president of the Maryland Senate. Bereano was close to the governor and virtually every legislative leader in the state. So formidable was he that not even a 1994 criminal conviction could slow him down. To Washington Post reporter Daniel LeDuc in February 1997, Senate President Miller clucked appropriate dismay at Bereano’s foul play but confessed,“I’d be less than candid if I didn’t say he was one of my closest friends.” For wary members of the Maryland legislature, supporting new cigarette taxes in 1997 would mean bucking the 1990s anti-tax tide. In 1992, angry voters had denied the first President George Bush a second term after he broke his pledge (“Read my lips”) never to raise taxes. In Maryland, as elsewhere, Democrats and Republicans alike were vowing no tax increases—ever. They were not making fine distinctions, for example, weighing the relative merits of cigarette taxes or the extent of public acceptance of them. Among them was Democrat Mike Miller, who quite aside from his tobacco allegiances was determined to head off Republican broadsides at tax-and-spend Democrats by swearing never to raise any taxes. On a personal level, legislators who were still confirmed smokers viewed cigarette tax increases with their own smoke in their eyes. Their subjective stance offset the personal commitment to tobacco control measures of tobacco’s victims and their supporters,among them Democratic governor Parris Glendening, who ached to support a cigarette tax increase as both a health measure and a revenue measure. His mother had died from smoking-inflicted lung cancer. In 1994—the year Republicans stormed to control of Congress,in no small part by vowing to cut taxes—Glendening had squeaked by in his election by barely five thousand votes over an anti-tax Republican, Ellen Sauerbrey. The new governor had taken comfort in even this narrow victory; he told the Baltimore Sun:“We survived a national tide.We’re one of the few Democrats who won, one of the few Democratic candidates for governor who won, and one of the very few non-incumbents to win.” Now Sauerbrey was on the prowl for issues to spark a rematch in 1998, eyeing Glendening’s every action for an opening—a political reality that threatened to sap the governor’s enthusiasm for a tobacco...