Smoked

Good sense was in evidence Tuesday not only among the voters of New Jersey, but among those in Oregon, who voted by a 59% to 41% margin to reject a scheme to increase the cigarette tax in the Beaver State by 84.5 cents a pack to pay for children's health insurance. It'd be one thing if these were voters in North Carolina or Virginia or some other tobacco state rejecting a tax on smokers, but this is Oregon, home of Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton and lots of other heath-conscious citizens. As anti-tax activist Grover Norquist told the Portland Oregonian, "Oregon is reasonably sane, moderate Democrats, and they said no."

The vote will resonate on the national scene, where congressional Democrats have been trying to raise the national cigarette tax by 61 cents to pay for expanding government health care to families making more than $80,000 a year. Government studies have found that offering government health insurance at that level means many people are dropping private insurance to accept the government-paid insurance. President Bush has vetoed the tax increase. The Democrats have been flogging him for it, hoping that it is a winning issue for them politically. The results in Oregon suggest that the politics of tax increases for the Democrats may not be as straightforward as they had hoped.

Backers of the tax increase are blaming their defeat on the influence of "Big Tobacco," which is an insult to the voters of Oregon — suggesting that they can be bought or, if that's not bad enough, fooled. The geniuses who thought voters would fall for linking tax increases and children's health insurance will need to rethink their strategy. Government-run health and welfare programs are unpopular enough on their own; those who advocate their expansion are only hurting their cause by linking them to another unpopular cause, tax increases, as if putting two bad ideas together would cancel out their unpopularity. Instead it makes them doubly unpopular — 59% unpopular, even in Oregon.