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There are certain to be more new rules. For the Governors' winter meeting in Washington a few weeks ago, Huckabee, who opened the conference by leading some of his fellow Governors and their staffs on a 5K run, invited a former fat kid who is also a quadruple-bypass patient to speak. Bill Clinton related to the problem of weight in typical feel-your-pain fashion. The two Arkansas pols, longtime adversaries, have joined together to work toward halting the rise in childhood obesity by 2010 and reversing it by 2015. "Look at Huckabee," Clinton told the Governors. "You've got to consume less and burn more. There is no other alternative. And to do that, you've got to change the culture."
But how? Embarrass Americans into saying no to that second helping of cheesecake? Taxing calories? Hauling the corporate chiefs of Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola before a congressional committee, as happened in 1994 with the heads of seven tobacco companies, and suing them? There have been many instances in which government has either rallied a majority to rescue a group of suffering Americans, as in the War on Poverty, or tried to push Americans out of unhealthy and expensive bad habits, including smoking, littering, drunk driving and failing to wear seat belts. All involved some combination of education, cultural change, legal penalties and old-fashioned shame.
But obesity does not evoke deprivation, and it's more complicated than a bad habit: it involves food. The old messages won't work, says veteran Democratic operative Michael Berman, whose new memoir, Living Large, chronicles his struggles to come to terms with being fat. "This is different from second-hand smoke, where you can have a program of abstinence. You can give up smoking. You can't give up eating."
Berman warns that even the best anti-obesity programs won't produce the gratification that politicians like best: quick results. That's because our growing waistlines are a product of so much else that is happening in the U.S. Researchers say it's not a coincidence that the obesity epidemic has coincided with a growth in the number of working parents who have less time to prepare meals from fresh foods; technologies that make it possible to mass-produce packaged and fast foods in cheap, enormous portions; financially strapped schools getting rid of their physical-education programs and playgrounds even as they allow vending machines and food advertising in their buildings; and computer and television programs that ensnare kids who might otherwise be playing outside.
Even larger economic forces may play a role. "It seems to be inextricably bound up to ... stagnant wages in the global economy," Clinton told the Governors. "The price of everything has gone up except food. Food is still a good deal in America." Rates of childhood obesity are worst among the poor and are a particular challenge in immigrant communities--in part because there's no cheaper dose of assimilation than a trip to Burger King. The New York Times Magazine reported that a couple of years ago, after administrators trimmed fat and sugar from menus at schools in Rio Grande City, Texas, along the Mexican border, students staged lunchroom protests, hanging signs that read NO MORE DIET and WE WANT TO EAT COOL STUFF--PIZZA, NACHOS, BURRITOS.