CLEAN CAMPAIGNS? TALK ABOUT THE ISSUES

Efforts to hammer out pledges of a clean campaign between Missouri's two candidates for U.S. senator are looking just a bit silly these days. Gov. Mel Carnahan and U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft long ago squared off for an epic battle unlike any in recent Missouri history. To get another comparison with a governor facing off against a sitting U.S. senator, you have to go back to the 1940 Democratic primary in which Gov. Lloyd Stark challenged then-Sen. Harry Truman for the latter's Senate seat, which incidentally is the one occupied today by Ashcroft.

GOP state chairman Ann Wagner had written Democratic officials asking for an end to recent "hurtful politics." Carnahan and the Democratic Party executive director immediately faxed a letter to Ashcroft and Wagner seeking a "clean campaign" pact for next year's race. Carnahan followed this up with a phone call, and the two spoke on Oct. 29. Little came out of the conversation and the letter exchange.

Most of this is posturing for what campaigns, and political operatives such as Temple and Wagner, will do in any case. Both sides could spare us the pious protestations of cleanliness and just get on with it. But then this campaign has already given us many low points.

It started with the reaction of state and national Democrats to the defeat of President Clinton's nomination to the federal bench of Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White. It is a reaction that can only be called hysterical. U.S. Reps. William Clay, D-Mo., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif., both were quick to hurl the R-word, accusing Ashcroft of racism for leading the effort to defeat White's nomination.

Other state and national Democrats picked up the theme, with day after day of the ugly accusation filling the air. After a couple of weeks of this, Republican sources leaked a 39-year-old photo from the Rolla Daily News of Carnahan performing in blackface at a Kiwanis fund raiser. The Carnahan photo is, in our judgment, a non-issue.

All this would be simply more campaign silliness if we didn't know what had gone before. That is to say, Missouri was home, just one year ago, to some of the deadliest, grossest and most indefensible race-baiting politics ever, and it was perpetrated by the Democratic Party. In St. Louis and Kansas City, at the close of last year's U.S. Senate campaign, ads paid for by Democrats ran on black radio stations that linked failure to vote with allowing black churches to burn and other ugly accusations. We didn't hear any protestations from Democrats or major media about the need for clean campaigns then.

Let's get on with the campaign and hope for the best. Campaigns have always been rough -- check out the accusations hurled against George Washington and Thomas Jefferson -- and doubtless they always will.