He’s Joe Camel, and if ever there was a lightning rod in the debate over whether tobacco advertising lures young people to smoke, this four-legged dude with the attitude is it.

Recently, Joe Camelalong with the Marlboro man, the Virginia Slims gals and othershelped provide the impetus for President Clinton’s move to sharply limit cigarette advertising in an effort to curb teen-age smoking. The tobacco industry is waging war on the plan, which includes a ban on billboard advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and would reduce tobacco ads to black-and-white text in magazines that have a youth readership of 15 percent or more.

Perhaps the biggest symbol in this controversy is smokin’ Joe, a party-hardy dromedary with an oversized schnoz, an ever-present smirk and a cigarette that is always lighted but never seems to burn. His foes think he’s sinister; an exercise in subliminal seduction, they allege, his face fashioned after a set of male genitals. His maker says he’s misunderstood, a scapegoat. (Make that scape-camel.) Whatever Joe is, one thing is certain:He’s good at selling cigarettes.

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For the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the maker of Camel cigarettes, Joe Camel has been a bonanza. The marketing campaign helped reverse the declining fortunes of an 82-year-old brand that the Tobacco Reporter once bluntly described as decrepit.

That has changed in the years since Joe worked his way into America’s cultural landscape, becoming a ubiquitous presence in magazines and on billboardsas well as on T-shirts, ball caps and other products that can be acquired with phony money, known as Camel cash, that bears the likeness of Joe dolled up, Ray-Bans and all, in a powdered George Washington wig.