KELLY EYES TAX CUT

State Auditor Margaret Kelly, the Republican nominee in this year's race for governor, has announced that she will propose as her campaign's centerpiece a tax cut of $500 million. If she announces a credible plan and sticks with it through the inevitable criticism, observers and armchair pundits who have often decried Kelly as insufficiently tough may just have to reevaluate their assessment of the auditor, a certified public accountant now in her third term.

The contrast with the incumbent governor, Mel Carnahan, promises to be a stark one indeed. As he wooed Missouri voters four years ago, Carnahan told us he had a plan to increase taxes for education by $200 million. When challenged, candidate Carnahan repeatedly reassured Missourians that he would never push for any such tax hike without a vote of the people.

Carnahan easily defeated a scandal-plagued attorney general and took office on Jan. 11, 1993. Four days later, a local circuit judge ruled Missouri's school foundation formula, by which $1.5 billion in state aid is distributed to local school districts, to be unconstitutional. Carnahan and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly immediately seized upon this single judge's questionable ruling -- it wasn't even a final, appealable order -- as the pretext for a huge tax increase, not of $200 million, but more than $310 million. Moreover, local property taxes rose dramatically in half of Missouri's school districts as Carnahan's administration held a gun to the head of local taxpayers. Gone was the public vote Carnahan had promised so often.

Like a moth wriggling to escape a sticky spider's web, try as he might, Mel Carnahan will never fully escape his identification with so swift a betrayal of a commitment so solemnly and recently made. It defines him and his administration. No amount of election-year tax cutting conversions or election-year tax lid proposals will set him free of it. Nor should they. This was as complete, brazen and contemptuous a betrayal as Missouri voters have ever seen.

Kelly appears to be taking a page from the successful tax-cutting playbooks of GOP governors in states such as New Jersey and Michigan. There, long-shot gubernatorial candidates Christy Todd Whitman and John Engler defeated heavily favored incumbents largely on the strength of tax-cutting proposals that were derided, as Kelly's will be, by the political elites and their echo chambers in Big Media. Better still, Whitman and Engler delivered on their commitments. Don't underestimate the power of this issue, if handled properly, to turn this election from an easy incumbent reelection into a horse race that could put Kelly in the governor's mansion.