KINDER'S COMMENTARY: BILL KENNEY RECHARGES GOP HOPES FOR GOVERNOR

My Senate colleague had a few folks in for a little get-together in Kansas City the other night -- last Thursday, to be exact. When it was over, a standing-room-only crowd of something like 800 people had packed into a ballroom at the Adams Mark Hotel, and the Bill Kenney for Governor campaign, which had showed $1,275 on hand as of the Sept. 30 reporting period, had been enriched to the tune of $162,000. As is common with such events, checks are still pouring in days later.

Looks like the old (age 40) Kansas City Chiefs quarterback can still throw deep, and when he does folks still cheer. In the old days of no limits on campaign donations, this would have been a wonderful sum to boast about. Today, under Missouri's toughest-in-the-nation law limiting individual donations to $300 in a four-year campaign cycle, it is nothing short of astonishing, and no candidate in either party can match it for a single event.

It was the opening kickoff of the Kenney for Governor campaign, which didn't exist as a going concern at the end of the previous campaign finance reporting period (June 30). Sen. Kenney, who made his first race for public office last year, when he easily defeated a sitting Democratic incumbent, is off to the races and, overnight, has changed the terms of the equation, electrifying a previously moribund Republican race to take back the governor's mansion.

Bill Kenney is a comfortable-as-an-old-shoe family man, happily married to wife Sandy, and he is the proud father of four children ranging in age from 14 to 3. The son of a longtime California public school superintendent and one of eight kids, he grew up in Southern California and headed to Arizona State University as a football player. When legendarily tough ASU coach Frank Kush wanted to make him into a lineman, quarterback Kenney departed for Northern Colorado University -- "not exactly a pipeline to the pros," as a friend of mine once savagely observed of another backwater school that isn't often thought of as producing NFL anything.

In Bill Kenney, though, the challenges of the NFL met their match. Cut by three teams, he persevered. Finally, he landed with the Chiefs and had a distinguished career that included one Pro Bowl appearance before rounding out his career with the Washington Redskins, playing for a Super Bowl-winning Joe Gibbs. He has since sold the cattle he used to raise on a ranch outside Kansas City and makes his living outside the Senate as a real estate broker.

In his first year in the Senate, Kenney established himself as a conservative solidly within the mainstream of his party, well-liked by everyone. His name isn't well-known on the eastern side of the state, but he is working hard in St. Louis where I tracked him down the morning after his KC event, and he hopes to remedy that over the next year. Bisect the state down the middle, and from Columbia and Jefferson City west the guy has real star quality: When the folks from Maryville or Joplin bring their fourth-grade class to tour the state capitol, the kids all want the Kenney autograph -- as often as not, to take back to their parents.

The Kansas City Star reported that in his announcement Kenney compared Gov. Mel Carnahan to President Bill Clinton, said both were "too liberal for too long" and "called for a less intrusive government, lower taxes and a crackdown on crime that would include a return to inmate chain gangs. `When the children of this state drive along our highways along with their parents, I want them to see firsthand the results of crime,' Kenney said."

Bill Kenney will make his first campaign trip to Cape Girardeau on Nov. 9. Who knows? The Missouri GOP may just have stumbled across a new quarterback.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.