by Michelle Maglalang Malkin

About the author: Michelle Maglalang Malkin was the 1995 Warren Brookes fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization that advocates free enterprise. She is currently on staff at the Seattle Times.

In one of countless anti-smoking missives, Jimmy Carter warned: “We must not be tricked again.” This is an apt, if unintended, admonition. For the Clinton administration’s 1995 regulatory offensive—backed blindly by Jimmy Carter, Barry Goldwater and a broad coalition of anti-tobacco organizations—was not an honest effort to rescue America’s youth from the perils of puffing. It was yet another thinly-disguised attempt to puff up the federal government’s public health powers by creating a phantom childhood epidemic.

President Clinton cited an alarming rise in pre-teen and teen-age...