By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 22, 1998; Page A20

When he launched his effort to create a tough new drunk driving standard for all 50 states, Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.) had a lot of powerful company-including President Clinton and most of his fellow senators. But when the deal making got down to the hard part, Chafee found himself virtually alone, abandoned by one of his closest Senate allies and actively opposed by Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

So when the Senate takes a final vote on the highway bill as soon as today, it will be missing a provision that 62 senators had wanted to become law: a nationwide rule that a person with a blood alcohol level of .08 is considered legally drunk. The death of ".08" offers a glimpse of the sort of back-room pressure politics that often come into play in the end stages of major legislation, forcing compromises and retreats that initially seemed unlikely.

From the beginning, House leaders and the alcoholic beverage and restaurant industries were adamant about killing the measure and had prevented their members from voting on it. But going into compromise talks over the highway bill, Chafee had the overwhelming support of his Senate colleagues, the White House and highway traffic safety groups including Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). The proposal was of such life-and-death importance, Chafee argued, that he was willing to hold up the $200 billion transportation legislation until his side prevailed.

By last Sunday afternoon, however, a weary and stoop-shouldered Chafee had thrown in the towel. Chafee dropped his demand in return for a number of House concessions including a $500 million incentive program to encourage voluntary state compliance with the standard-an approach dismissed by MADD as ineffective. "There's only so long you can slug it out-duke it out-and maintain your position," explained an aide to Chafee. "Even for a veteran of two wars like Chafee, eventually you have to give in."

Indeed, the veteran Republican moderate and one-time Navy secretary found himself hemmed in during the final hours of the weekend talks: After weeks of tough rhetoric, the White House signaled the president wasn't willing to go to the mat over the .08 provision by threatening a veto. Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), Chafee's closest Republican ally on the Environment and Public Works Committee and a supporter of ".08", had grown impatient with the slow pace of the talks-once he had nailed down the funding he sought for a replacement of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge-and counseled Chafee to bow to the House. "Let it go, Mr. Chairman, let it go," Warner told Chafee.

More importantly, Lott worked vigorously with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) behind the scenes to undermine Chafee. Though highly sensitized to the drun- driving issue after losing his father to an alcohol-related traffic accident in 1969-and despite the vote of his own chamber-Lott nonetheless shared House conservatives' antipathy towards new state mandates.

Lott and Gingrich privately counseled House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster (R-Pa.) to hang tough against Chafee, assuring him that in the end Chafee could muster few votes for the .08 provision among the Senate conferees, according to sources. Although the Senate had overwhelmingly endorsed the .08 provision, only eight of 18 members of the Environment Committee had backed it.

"From the very beginning we were told that Chafee doesn't have the votes . . . and that all we had to do was sit on our hands and do nothing," said a well-placed House GOP source.

During a House-Senate GOP leadership meeting May 13, Lott reminded Chafee in front of Shuster that "we want incentives, not mandates," according to sources. As talks over the cash-rich bill dragged on, Lott repeatedly called Chafee and other GOP Senate negotiators at the Capitol to urge them to bend on .08 and wrap up the talks. According to House sources, Lott told Chafee during a weekend conference call, "By God, John, get it done."

Lott said this week that while he repeatedly conferred with Chafee during the talks, "I kept saying, you know, you're the chairman, you and Bud Shuster have got to work through these things."

"I've never made any secret, I think that the drug alcohol level should be .08, but I'm opposed to punishing poor states if for some reason their legislators don't feel that they can do that," Lott added.

Chafee agreed that Lott gave him relatively wide latitude in negotiating the final deal. In defending his decision, Chafee noted that he got several important concessions in return, including dropping a controversial "mid-course correction" provision that would have allowed Congress to make wholesale changes in the bill in three years. The House also accepted proposals for cracking down on repeat drunk drivers and on driving with open containers of alcoholic beverages.

The decision marked a bitter setback for millions of members of MADD. The group has lobbied for the past 14 years on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures to set the "per se threshold" for intoxification at .08 grams of alcohol per deciliter of blood, in place of the .10 standard followed by most states. While advocates argue that the tougher standard would discourage drunk driving and substantially reduce highway mayhem, only 16 states currently enforce the tougher standard.

The Senate approved the .08 national standard on March 4, by a vote of 62 to 32. Under the approach devised by Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), states that refuse to adopt the tougher drunk driving standard could lose up to 10 per cent of their highway funds. But the House insisted instead on using highway funding bonuses to encourage states to adopt .08 and other traffic safety regulations.

Leaders of MADD and other groups blamed their defeat largely on the aggressive lobbying tactics of the alcoholic beverage, restaurant and hospitality industries. These industries have claimed that the measure would do little to reduce deaths while cutting into their business by discouraging "responsible social drinking."

"Our nation's drunk driving laws have been written by the alcohol and hospitality industry-a tragic irony that will likely result in many needless deaths and injuries at the hands of impaired drivers," said Karolyn V. Nunnallee, MADD's national president. While MADD officials praised Chafee for his "stalwart" efforts, Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen sharply criticized Chafee for "caving" to Lott and the House rather than forcing a deadlock.

"We're quite angry about this," she said. "We think this is a life-and-death issue. You can have $200 billion of new money for highways and you're going to have more deaths and injuries. Why?"

But the deck was stacked against the .08 provision going into conference. The proponents' claim to the moral high ground on the issue did little to sway the leadership and a broad array of Republicans and Democrats who perceived the measure as an intrusion on states' rights and their constituents' lifestyles.

"So often in a conference, the momentum of an issue and the fervor of the advocates is what will sway the undecideds," said Rick Berman, chief lobbyist for the American Beverage Institute, a leading foe of the standard. "I don't think the proponents had it. I think they overreached."