Campaign year offers stark choices about our future

In the 14th visit to our state of his presidency, President Bush will be in St. Louis Monday for his only Missouri fund raiser of this campaign. Receipts topped the $2 million mark some days ago on the way to what will likely prove the largest and most successful political fund raiser in Missouri history.

During a mid-afternoon visit to Pierre Laclede public school, this writer will have the honor of joining the president as we listen and learn about the challenges of schooling our young people in one of America's most troubled inner cities.

The president's visit will follow by 48 hours the visit to St. Louis of U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The former first lady's visit will boost the campaign of State Treasurer Nancy Farmer, who is challenging Sen. Kit Bond in his campaign for re-election.

These are the first of this year's many high-profile Missouri campaign stops in an extraordinarily consequential election year. It is an election that will offer Missourians and Americans stark choices about our future direction.

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Speaking of Nancy Farmer, here's an anecdote from the fall of 2002. Nancy and I came into the legislature together after the 1992 election and have been friends ever since. A fall party the evening of the first playoff game of the St. Louis Cardinals found us eagerly awaiting our chance to root for the Redbirds. It was about four weeks before the 2002 election that pitted former U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan against Jim Talent, who narrowly emerged victorious. Farmer was in the company of three or four friends, including a couple of Democratic consultants and an executive who had been an aide to former U.S. senator Tom Eagleton.

I greeted Nancy and the others and took a place at the end of the bar, a few feet away. A discussion ensued between them that I couldn't help but overhear. My Democratic friends were discussing TV ads that had then been aired for weeks by the Carnahan campaign. These were the ones savaging Talent, whom Carnahan was outspending roughly 2-1, on the subject of Social Security and Talent's alleged support for privatizing same. The discussion went something like this:

"Hey, how about those Carnahan ads on Social Security? They're really tough! Surely they're going to win the election for Jean. Those ads really cut!"

After three or four minutes of this, I couldn't resist. Walking past them to the food table, I smiled and -- in a voice tinged with sarcasm -- said to my Democratic friends:

"Yeah, you know, you guys have got it right. I don't want the option to have any stocks in my portfolio. I want that guaranteed 1 percent return we can all look forward to with Social Security!" Dropping the sarcasm, I followed with the statement that "over the last 75 years, the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression included, stocks have returned an average annual return of 11 percent."

These remarks were met with sheepish agreement from my Democratic friends, including Nancy, who as state treasurer is custodian of our state's billions in tax receipts.

Here's the point: Today's Democratic Party and its leading candidates don't believe their own stuff. Their approach is whatever works to scare old folks, minorities, women, the poor, union members -- it doesn't matter. It's just another scare campaign.

This cynical approach has worked on occasion. It won't work this year against this president and the united party he leads. Bring on the contest.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.