Big Tobacco Got Burned, or How I Would Have Won on the Bad Side of Question 3

Question 3 on Kansas City's ballots a week from today is a proposal to prevent inconsiderate people from imposing health risks and cleaning bills on their intellectual and moral superiors. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom that will prevail at the polls next Tuesday, despite the $225,000 spent by tobacco companies to shift that attitude.

The tobacco companies got cheated.

They're not losing because they're evil. They're losing because they ran an utterly ineffective campaign. With the money they've tossed into the cause, I could have delivered a victory for them.

Mind you, I'm not going to go crying any tears for big tobacco. Their business model has been to spread death and to lie about it, so I hold no sympathy for them. I just didn't know they were so foolish.

First off, whoever designed those yard signs should be ashamed. The key to yard signs is to deliver a message at a glance. The "No on 3" signs, though, deliver an undecipherable black bar. Not only is it ugly, but, more importantly, the black bar swallows the dark red 3. The message delivered is "NO on Question". The "NO" stands out fine, but the sign fails in its main purpose.

Next, the whole thrust of the campaign was poorly chosen. Rather than running against casinos, big tobacco has been running to protect small business owners. Sorry, friends, but nobody really cares about bar owners. "Business rights" might sound good when you're sitting around having a pity party with your fellow bar owners, but the rest of us aren't crying into your river. We're also not falling for the made-up statistics claiming that all our local bars are going to close and the taps will grow cobwebs. It's a lie, and nobody's falling for it, so if they had spent half an hour listening to a focus group, they would have adopted an entirely different theme.

Now that it's too late for them to change their theme and yank up those worthless yard signs, I'll go ahead and give them the advice they needed before they blew almost a quarter million dollars.

"Don't Stack the Deck. No on 3. No More Breaks for Gaming."

There it is. A sense of unfairness. A focus on the casino exemption - the one aspect of the Smoking Ban that makes absolutely no sense to people of good will. And a big ugly target to run against.

Kansas Citians don't like big businesses getting an advantage over the rest of us. That's one of the main reasons that Funkhouser's Mayoral campaign focused on the TIF pigs. While not a single person in Kansas City could point to a single dollar that a TIF project had taken out of his or her pocket, the resentment against cozy insiders making big money over breakfast with the former Mayor ran deep.

The casinos should have been the TIF pigs of this race. Especially since they wouldn't even fight back - there's no way they would actually promote anti-smoking legislation.

Of course, I would have also ran a better street campaign, even beyond the yard signs. Every beer in Kansas City would have been served on a coaster that looked like a big ace of spades, with "Don't stack the deck - No on 3" written on it. Letters to the editor would focus on "why are we giving more breaks to the casinos?". Press releases would point out that this proposal favors not only the KC casino, but also the ones in other municipalities. I'd have those little oval car stickers with "NO3" available at every bar, and plastered on every bar employee's car.

Question 3 will pass by a healthy margin next Tuesday, and I'm glad of it. I'll be happy to see people voting in favor of clean air and pleasant bars.

But if the bar owners and tobacco companies were smart, we'd all be going out on Tuesday to vote against another break for "the house". I could have won this race for them. I'm glad they hired the incompetents.