KINDER'S COMMENTARY: A LONG SHOT? SURE, BUT JOHN ASHCROFT COULD BE GOP'S MAN

Ten days into the ascent of a trial balloon for the presidential candidacy of Missouri's junior senator, and few are laughing. A longshot? Sure, but who knows? John David Ashcroft just might be able to do it. Besides, the downside risk is minimal for Ashcroft, likely an unbeatable candidate for re-election should a national candidacy falter.

A presidential campaign in this great continental nation is, according to Bob Dole, a quintessential legislative insider and awkward national candidate who spent 20 years trying, like "dipping a teaspoon into the ocean." That's all the more true in the early stages, and for a first-timer such as Ashcroft. The field is so huge, the players so numerous and the egos so gigantic as to be overwhelming.

The GOP nomination contest in the year 2000 will be the first time since 1967 that Republicans haven't had a clear, preeminent national leader. It also promises, notes The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, the most wide-open nominating contest since 1940. That year saw a pathetic, Depression-shrunken Republican Party nominate a little-known utility executive named Wendell Wilkie for the suicide run against FDR's third-term steamroller.

The millenial year 2000 should offer anything but a suicide run for a strong, self-confident Republican nominee. For the first time since the 1920s, Republicans can claim to be the nation's natural majority party. Holding 32 governors' mansions governing 75 percent of America's population, Republicans re-elected congressional majorities in both houses last year. The GOP-held governors mansions include such huge presidential battlegrounds as New Jersey and Michigan, Wisconsin and California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Texas. Next year should yield an expanded GOP majority in the U.S. Senate, where they now hold 55 of 100 seats. Republicans have also welcomed as party-switchers 320 elected officials at local, state and national levels since Bill and Hillary took office in 1993. Recent doldrums for congressional Republicans haven't dimmed this strong, underlying tide: Dozens of party-switching state lawmakers and local officials have made the break in recent weeks in Florida, Texas and Louisiana, among others.

This weekend finds John Ashcroft making his first test-the-water trek to New Hampshire, where he is likely to find he is the sort of candidate favored by the Manchester Union-Leader, the Granite State's hard-hitting, influential statewide newspaper. Publisher Nacky Loeb, whose late husband backed an insurgent Gov. Ronald Reagan against a sitting Republican president 21 years ago, still writes tough, front-page editorials for her favorites. In recent years her favorite has been Pat Buchanan, God love him, and a turn toward Ashcroft would be a turn toward the mainstream.

Columnist Gigot notes that it is no accident that presidential hopeful "Ashcroft ... voted against the budget deal" week before last. This will likely count in a GOP forced to look for leaders beyond the increasingly comfortable inside players who cut the flawed deal they celebrated on the White House lawn this week. Republicans could do worse than look to Ashcroft, a former two-term governor repeatedly proven a big, even landslide winner in an historically Democratic state. In Ashcroft's two races for governor he won with 57 and 64 percent -- the latter the fattest winning margin of any Missouri governor since the Civil War -- before winning his current office with 60 percent.

Here's a prediction: A ticket consisting of John Ashcroft and publisher Steve Forbes, with either in the top spot, would carry more than 40 states in November 2000.

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