“No on 99” Ads Leave This Viewer Smoking

Gosh, hi.

Shucks, I’m just an ordinary, honest, hard-working, well-meaning, Mom-loving, God-fearing, generous, caring, patriotic former Eagle Scout and Vietnam War hero who’s never spoken out on anything before.

Heck, I don’t even smoke.

And, jeepers, I’m not the kind who makes rash statements or uses scare tactics on folks.

So you know that I mean it when I promise that if you vote for Proposition 99--the tobacco tax initiative--one or all of the following will happen:

--There will be nuclear war.

--California will go Communist.

--You will be set upon by hordes of Ninja warriors.

--Morton Downey Jr. will visit your house and stay for dinner.

--George Bush will personally riddle your body with 1,000 points of light.

The preceding message was brought to you by Citizen Against Advertisements That Are Dishonest and Misleading.

Seriously, never in memory has television been a receptacle for so many dastardly political commercials. Yes, many of the ads for the presidential, congressional and county races make you want to gag. And enough is enough.

But it’s . . . the others.

The airwaves are reeking from spots tied to the numerous state ballot issues that Californians will vote on Tuesday. You sit through some of them with a clothespin on your nose or risk keeling over from the fumes.

Viewers are probably already desensitized by years of TV commercials that hyperbolize and express half-truths and even lies through a medium that in many ways is a never-ending commercial for itself. But The Ads of ’88 may live forever in gut-wrenching infamy.

The war of insurance initiative ads is nothing to cheer. Even worse, however, is the massive tobacco-industry campaign claiming that Prop. 99--which calls for an additional 25-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes--would be a calamity.

For the record, revenue from Prop. 99 would help finance medical treatment for those unable to pay, anti-smoking education, tobacco-related disease research and programs supporting public resources.

No, the tobacco industry hasn’t raised the specter of Ninjas. But close.

The clear intent of the earliest “No on 99” blitz was to convince voters that Prop. 99 would trigger a crime wave in California, one that would pour money into gangs and stretch the resources of police, who would be so preoccupied with cigarette smugglers that other crime would flourish.

A vote for Prop. 99, as the argument went, was a vote for crime.

That was repudiated by most law enforcement authorities. Yet the ad kept running, with the man on the screen who identified himself as an “undercover cop” (later to be revealed as a cop with a desk job) declaring: “99 is the first initiative ever that would actually create more crime.”

More current ads feature actors in the roles of “just plain folks” protesting Prop. 99, evoking the dreaded “P” word--prejudice--in charging that the added cigarette tax somehow would undercut basic American freedoms while also lining the pockets of the initiative’s supporters.

Says the clean-cut yuppie in the bar:

“In America, we just don’t do that. And when they start fooling around with my freedom, well, those are fighting words.”

The “No on 99” spots themselves are fighting words.

Credit KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles and KGO in San Francisco with excellent judgment in rejecting the crime-wave spot (in fact, Channel 7 has turned down all Prop. 99-related commercials) when the sponsoring Tobacco Institute could not prove its crime-wave claim and would not modify the wording.

And credit Round Table Pizza with creative self-promotion in ridiculing the “No on 99” crime-scare campaign with its own “Cheese Initiative” radio spots in the San Francisco, San Jose and Santa Rosa areas.

Developed by San Francisco adman John Crawford, these side-splitting Round Table spots urge rejection of a “Round Table Cheese Initiative” that “would force all pizza parlors to do as Round Table does and use real aged provolone and real whole milk mozzarella, driving up the price of real cheese and attracting thugs and punks to dairy farming.”

Even worse, we’re told, as those thugs and punks shout in the background, this would cause dairy cow hijackings, create a lucrative market for the dreaded “Swiss mafia” and “deprive you of your right to choose a pizza made with cheap cheese.”

Catastrophic!

Meanwhile, credit much of the public with ultimately seeing through “No on 99” ad rhetoric. At least that’s the word from Maureen Marr, deputy director of the heavily outspent “Yes on 99” campaign, whose own polls agree with a recent Los Angeles Times poll that the cigarette tax measure is comfortably ahead.

After initially cutting deeply into the huge lead that “Yes on 99” had in the polls, the “No on 99” crime-wave message ran smack into a public backlash, and the erosion of support has now stopped, Marr believes.

She adds that if you don’t believe her, you’ll turn into a frog.