That can be the only plausible excuse for them voting down Measure 50, right? Last night Oregonians (which tend to be very Liberal) voted down the huge tobacco tax increase, which would’ve payed for government-subsidized health care. Children haters!!1!

Oregon’s working poor will have to wait a while longer to get health-care coverage for their children.

Voters easily defeated Measure 50, a plan to raise tobacco taxes to provide universal health care for children after a record-shattering negative ad campaign financed by cigarette companies.

The measure went down by a wide margin, both statewide and in Marion and Polk counties.

Dubbed the Healthy Kids Program, Measure 50 was a top priority of Gov. Ted Kulongoski and fellow Democrats in the Oregon Legislature. Democrats placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot when they couldn’t get enough Republican votes to pass it outright or submit it to voters as a simple statute.

“The tobacco industry won this battle,” Kulongoski told a somber crowd of Measure 50 supporters in Portland. “But they will not win the war.”

In Salem, pediatrician James Lace said tobacco companies ran an effective campaign, “and they outspent us 4 to 1.”

“I think it failed because people got confused by the whole issue of the constitutional amendment,” he said .

J.L. Wilson, a spokesman for the RJ Reynolds campaign to defeat the tax increase, said the tobacco companies’ $12 million budget helped, but only because it raised legitimate concerns about Measure 50.

“Ultimately I think the measure collapsed under its own weight,” Wilson said.

Michelle writes:

The electorate in Oregon soundly rejected the plan not because they are gullible and stupid and “confused,” but because they looked past the kiddie human shields and saw the regressive tax increase and entitlement expansion Trojan Horse for what they were:

Bad, bad ideas.

Indeed. Democrats in this debate have had a tendency to believe that if you’re not siding with them you’re being misled, you simply don’t understand, or you hate children.