IGNORE THOSE STRAWS IN WIND THAT MAY DIVERT CLEAR THOUGHT PROCESSES

Some might call them straws in the wind. Others detect even clearer signs. But whatever your preference, a convergence of events is bringing into focus exactly what is at stake in this year's elections, both state and federal. Ignore them at your peril.

* Item: The headline in the morning paper might as well have been "Clinton-Gore EPA to Bootheel landowners, residents: Drop dead." Friday morning, Missourians awoke to a one-sided Associated Press story concerning the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to give its lowest rating to a Bootheel flood project supported overwhelmingly in the affected counties of Scott, Mississippi and New Madrid. "This is a project that needs to go back to the drawing board," said David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation about the much-vetted St. John's Bayou-New Madrid Floodway project, nearly 70 years in the making, which enjoys the support of every local, state and federal elected officials from both parties. The St. John's project would alleviate persistent flooding affecting especially New Madrid and Mississippi Counties owing to a 1,500-foot gap in the mainstem Mississippi River levee near the city of New Madrid.

The Clinton-Gore EPA's decision to choose radical environmentalism of the Alan Journet stripe will have one certain effect: To continue, and accelerate, the transformation of once all-Democratic, all-the-time Bootheel counties from their Civil War roots in democracy toward the party of Abraham Lincoln. (Note well: Following the 1998 election, Mississippi, Scott and New Madrid Counties are represented in the Missouri House of Representatives by Republicans.) My great-grandfather, Harvard Law School graduate and Democratic Sen. William Joseph Hunter of Benton must be turning over in his grave. Senator Hunter (1880-84 in Missouri Senate) was a leader in the decades-long effort to drain tens of thousands of acres of what was then Swampeast Missouri, an environmental crime that today would cause his complete media demonization before being packed off to federal prison.

* Item: By means of the executive order of which the Clinton and Carnahan administrations are increasingly enamored, our governor has acted lately. The subject: To enact into law the kind of blatantly unconstitutional quotas and set-asides in government construction projects that the U.S. Supreme Court consistently strikes down as violative of equal protection of the law. In fact, the recent Carhanan executive order far exceeds any statutory enactment to just sort of Al Sharton-ize Missouri government construction projects. Rather what you might expect from an administration that reacted the way it did to the Rev. Sharpton's extended extortion act last summer. You remember the Brooklyn rabble-rouser's lying down on I-70 to block rush-hour traffic. While some administrations would have seen a clear duty to arrest the Brooklyn rabble-rouser, the Carnahan crowd saw it as an occasion to sit down and negotiate with the New Yorker.

It's becoming increasingly clear to folks who were yellow-dog Democrats that this is what you get when you send today's Democrats to Jefferson City and Washington. Tragically, we're seeing more of it from a Missouri Conservation Commission that always used to side with Missouri values, and today can more often be found winning plaudits from Professor Journet and his pals in the Biology Department faculty lounge.

Somehow I suspect Great-grandpa Hunter, who died in 1919, would understand.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.