Gregoire: The Tiger Lady, Or Expensive Paper Tiger?

A COMMON thread runs through the legal triumphs and tribulations of Attorney General Christine Gregoire: tenacious and costly ineffectiveness.

Gregoire threw herself whole into the mega-billion-dollar tobacco settlement that garnered national headlines. "This case is about saving lives. There's no greater calling for me than making a quality of life better for adults and saving kids' lives," she said.

Gregoire was hailed as "the tiger lady" for her fierce negotiations with tobacco companies on behalf of the states. In the end, though, her softer side prevailed: "It's emotional, there's no question about it," she admitted through victorious tears at the King County Courthouse last week.

Gregoire is a tireless, telegenic and articulate spokeswoman. No question. But not all that is well-said is well-conceived. Emotion and easy bucks, not legal rationality, drove the tobacco deal. Our state alone will recoup about $4 billion over the next 25 years for health-care costs it was supposedly "forced" to pay because of Big Tobacco's wrongful conduct.

Yet, state officials were well aware of the risks of smoking long before participating - voluntarily - in the Medicaid program. Moreover, the state continues to profit from investing in tobacco stocks and has itself passed out free cancer sticks to prison inmates.

The settlement jacks up cigarette prices in the hopes of dissuading youthful smokers. But despite all the tough talk of the

state attorneys general on behalf of "The Children," the $206 billion settlement will at best have a marginal effect on teen smoking. As New York Times reporter Barry Meier detailed earlier this spring, the nation's top experts on tobacco use and statistics agree that predictions of teen smoking reduction "are little more than wild estimates that are raising what may be unreasonable expectations for change in youth smoking rates."

Gregoire continues to emphasize the 1 million children a year who will be saved from early death as a result of the settlement. But that figure - an American Cancer Society concoction - has been resoundingly discredited as an empty goal with no analysis to back it up. In fact, the longest-term study conducted to date, by Cornell University researchers, shows no statistical relationship at all between higher cigarette prices and youth smoking. The Cornell study found that states that increased tobacco taxes did not have significantly fewer children who started smoking compared with states that raised taxes at a slower rate or not at all.

The only certain result of Gregoire's dogged efforts is the punishment of low-income, adult smokers who will disproportionately bear the public costs of a national trial lawyers' boondoggle.

Unfortunately for Gregoire, this is as good as it gets. Her other major legal entanglements show a similar pattern of saddling innocent parties with the financial burden of her office's legal failings. Lost in the anti-tobacco hoopla was the latest fine against the AG for failing to disclose public records. On Nov. 13, Thurston County Superior Court Judge Richard Hicks slapped Gregoire's office with $33,000 in fines and legal fees for not releasing documents in a timely fashion. Who pays? Taxpayers.

The suppressed papers, requested by the Olympia-based Evergreen Freedom Foundation, were related to the AG's settlement of campaign-finance violation charges with the state teachers' union. Despite Gregoire's initial tenacity in pursuing the case against the Washington Education Association, she later negotiated an agreement that guts Initiative 134. The law, passed overwhelmingly by voters in 1992, states clearly that no employer or entity "responsible for the disbursement of funds in payment of wages . . . may withhold or divert a portion of an employee's wages . . . for use as political contributions except upon the written request of the employee."

After initially calling the WEA's claim that it was exempt from the paycheck-protection provision "absurd," Gregoire did an about-face. Under her settlement, union leaders can now spend money for political purposes through the WEA general fund without prior written permission from members. The AG's office touted a historic $430,000 in fines and penalties against the WEA. Who pays? Not those who engaged in willful thwarting of the law, but the rank-and-file teachers who were wronged in the first place. The so-called rebate of $330,000 in illegally collected dues to 65,000 WEA members is being paid for by a temporary reduction of the union's mandatory payroll deduction from those same members' paychecks.

In an even more recent set of negotiations that passes the bill on to taxpayers, the AG agreed to settle last week with 12 former residents of the infamous OK Boys Ranch for $5.5 million. That's on top of nearly $15 million already paid to settle claims - and in addition to a $417,500 fine levied against Gregoire's office for failing to turn over key documents to lawyers representing victims of sexual abuse at the group home.

Gregoire should enjoy the afterglow of her victory against Big Tobacco while she can. Like voters in Minnesota and Massachusetts, who rejected her colleagues (Attorneys General Hubert Humphrey III and Scott Harshbarger), voters in Washington may soon realize that Gregoire specializes in a kind of legal leadership that taxpayers can't afford.

Michelle Malkin's column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is: malkin1@ix.netcom.com.