Organizing the Campaign

The ALA's original $50,000 contribution defined the financial standard for Executive Committee membership of the Coalition for a Healthy California. From June through September, the Executive Committee consisted of the ALA, ACS, PCL, and Connelly. The AHA, which did not consider political issues like the tobacco tax initiative a priority,^[4] did not participate on the Executive Committee, nor did the CMA or CAHHS.

The effort by the tobacco industry to “tokenize” the CMA's participation was only one part of the industry's strategy to deny resources to the Coalition. In its report to the Tobacco Institute, A-K Associates noted, “Connelly, being a strong and respected member of the liberal political community, personally sought help from the Hayden/Fonda machine and organized labor.”^[5] The industry hoped to block the participation of these groups, too.

Campaign California, a liberal statewide political organization founded by Assembly Member Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) and his wife, actress Jane Fonda, had approached the Coalition in the spring and expressed interest in participating in the tobacco tax effort. While Campaign California had money to help finance the effort, a full-time campaign staff, and statewide volunteers, some Coalition members were concerned that Hayden, Fonda, and Campaign California's liberal politics would have a negative impact on the Coalition and the tobacco tax effort. By July, however, they let Campaign California join the Executive

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Committee because the Coalition needed their help. The industry countered this move by approaching Campaign California through the polling firm Fairbank, Bregman and Maullin (which also did a lot of work for Democrats) to convince Hayden “that there is little advantage to him personally or politically to get involved in the Connelly tobacco tax Initiative. Hayden/Fonda has pledged a modest $25,000 to the tax initiative.”^[5] This amount was the same as that pledged by the CMA, enough to support the effort without providing it with sufficient resources to succeed. But in contrast to the CMA, Campaign California was to make a significant contribution to the campaign that went well beyond monetary value.

Connelly tried to attract organized labor by offering to incorporate into the tobacco tax initiative the provisions of a pending union initiative designed to strengthen Cal-OSHA's worker protections. Jack Henning, secretary-treasurer of the California AFL-CIO, turned him down. (Organized labor had sided with the tobacco industry in opposing Propositions 5, 10, and P.) The tobacco industry, working through Paul Kinney of A-K Associates, had already made a deal to keep organized labor out of the tobacco tax effort.^[5]

In September 1987, W. James Nethery, a dentist and the immediate past president of ACS, was elected chair of the Coalition, which reinforced ACS's involvement. The Coalition hired Jack Nicholl as full-time campaign director. Nicholl, the past executive director of Campaign California, brought essential statewide political and campaign expertise to the Coalition. Nicholl set up the campaign headquarters in Los Angeles. When later asked why he had chosen Los Angeles over Sacramento, he answered, “If you listen to most of the griping that's going on, it's the Sacramento crowd that's griping. …They were always tied in these knots of conflict and contradiction among themselves. …That's why I insisted that the headquarters had to be in LA. Because that's where people are, that's where the money is, and that's where you get away from this crap.”^[6] The Coalition also hired Ken Masterton to coordinate the signature campaign. Masterton, who had managed the winning campaign for Proposition P in San Francisco in 1983, was not only experienced on the tobacco issue but also willing to work with both voluntary and paid circulators.

Nicholl tried once again to interest some of the veterans of the Propositions 5, 10, and P campaigns and was rebuffed as others had been. Nicholl approached Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San

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Francisco, whose expertise in anti-smoking legislation he respected. Glantz declined to get involved: “I told them I thought they didn't have a prayer of winning. And even if they did, it was a stupid idea because the only thing that mattered was the tax and they may as well take the money out and dump it off the Golden Gate Bridge, because the health department would never run the kind of gutsy program it would take to do any good. And so I had basically nothing to do with it because shortly thereafter I went to Vermont on sabbatical to write a statistics textbook. I'm pleased that I was wrong.”^[7]