When a modern pro athlete jumps to a new team and says, "It's not about the money," everyone instantly knows it's about the money. This is also the way to understand the political frenzy to shaft the rich mine of Big Tobacco.

Everyone here claims that what they really care about is "teen smoking." And maybe there are five or six people left who really believe that. But for most politicians, this is about the mob psychology of a gold rush. The point is to avoid being trampled while grabbing a share.

How else to explain that last June's mind-boggling $368 billion tobacco settlement has somehow become inadequate and has since grown in Congress to a mind-blowing $516 billion? Or that a Republican majority supposedly averse to tax increases is whooping through this enormous tax hike? Or that Democrats who supposedly bleed for the poor are euphoric about piling onto the most regressive tax there is?

This week the tobacco companies decided that this political "process" has gotten out of control. (This is the kind of astute analysis lobbyists here provide.) They're now opposing a deal, at least for a while, and the politicians are reacting with ritual dismay and disappointment, at least for the cameras. But for everyone else this collapse may be for the best. While the tobacco companies deserve whatever they get, the rest of us don't.

Consider the tax increase contained in Republican John McCain's Senate bill. It would raise the price of cigarettes by about $1.21 a pack by 2003. Thus the tax would be paid by the nation's 45 million smokers, who are more often poor and lower middle class. Other parts of the bill would lift per-pack prices even more.

Based on current tax and smoking data, Patrick Fleenor of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimates that about 34 percent of this new tax burden would fall on those earning less than $15,000 a year. About 59 percent would be paid by those earning less than $35,000. Only about 2 percent would hit those making more than $150,000. Everyone knows Karl Marx is no longer the Democrats' chief economist; but who would have thought they'd hire Groucho?

Democrats seem to believe such a regressive tax is kosher because it's for smokers' own good. But tell that to the average two-smoker household that would pay some $1,327 a year more by 2003. In the name of saving kids from a habit that may kill them in 40 years, our pols would take spending money from parents who need it today for clothes or food.

This might even be tolerable if anyone were sure that prices are decisive in kids deciding to smoke. Anyone who ever puffed behind school knows that peer pressure and MTV have as much influence on teens. Thus the advertising and marketing restrictions agreed to by the tobacco companies last June are probably more important than price.

Yet pols in both parties are happy to risk losing those restrictions (which must be voluntary under the First Amendment) in order to grab more cash for their own political ends. In his budget proposal this year, President Clinton allocated tobacco money for many good things--child care, education, virtue, motherhood.

The GOP wants its share to finance a tax cut it doesn't have the courage to pass merely using the budget surplus. If Democrats want to soak their own working-class voters, Republicans will gladly take that money and redistribute some of it to their supporters.

But now that the tobacco companies have walked away, Republicans are left with the nastier political dilemma. They can let the McCain bill die, but at the risk of attacks by Democrats for being in the pocket of Big Tobacco.

Or they can pass a bill that builds a mammoth FDA, enriches trial lawyers and all but nationalizes what has been a legal industry. You don't have to be a libertarian or a smoker to worry about this precedent for the next business that becomes unfashionable. And of course Republicans would also be raising taxes, further muting what was once a huge GOP advantage. (The latest ABC-Washington Post poll had the two parties trusted about equally on taxes.)

This is why the most partisan liberals (Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. Henry Waxman) have kept pushing last summer's settlement to the left. They'd just as soon run on the issue this autumn.

Clinton has played a similar double game. Though his agents -- legal fixer Bruce Lindsey and brother-in-law Hugh Rodham -- were vital in cutting last June's deal, the president has since always demanded more. He claims he wants an agreement but has done nothing to get one.

So it would serve all of them right if what they ended up with was also nothing. The tobacco companies thought they could buy protection from lawsuits after years of duplicity. The Washington pols had a windfall handed to them but have since proved they can be as greedy as Big Tobacco.

If Congress fails to pass anything, then everyone will have to return to the product-liability battlefield in court. This is where longtime tobacco critic and sensible public-health advocate Elizabeth Whelan has said the issue properly belongs anyway. Juries can hardly behave worse than the politicians have.

If we're lucky it'll be another Hundred Years War.