KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CLINTON HAS GOODIES: DOES THIS SOUND LIKE LESS GOVERNMENT?

Key Word: COLUMNS

An ancient Chinese curse says, "May you live in interesting times."

We do. President Clinton delivered his State of the Union address last week, and what was the substance? The biggest explosion of spending since the heyday of LBJ's Great Society plus the beginning of a government takeover of the stock market. Back to the '60s.

This is the president who three years ago, campaigning for re-election, took the same opportunity to inform Americans, "The era of big government is over." Now he proposes to grow it dramatically, with a subsidy for every Democratic interest group in sight and tax credits for those who will clean their rooms the way Hillary Clinton likes it done.

At least Republican congressional leaders seem to have begun recovering their voice. GOP House and Senate leaders are announcing plans to push for across-the-board 10 percent tax reductions for every American. Good for them. As Paul Gigot writes in Friday's Wall Street Journal, "Republicans have little choice but to return to their roots of protecting taxpayers from the revival of welfare-state liberalism. Politics might even mean something again."

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Liberals man the barricades: The following excerpt of Walter Shapiro's writing is from the New Republic, probably America's leading journal of liberal opinion:

"So why have liberals rushed to mortgage their own integrity in their zealous defense of Clinton's loathsome legalisms? There is something that smacks of Bonapartism in the Democrats' confusion of personal fealty with political principle. Another lustily oversized Democratic president (Grover Cleveland) was beloved `for the enemies he ... made.' But why should the enmity of the Christian Coalition, Richard Mellon Scaife and the tobacco companies excuse Clintons' lack of a moral compass in his personal life and his reckless disregard of the laws governing perjury? Part of the answer emanates from Clinton's unique status as the only politically successful president in 35 years. Downtrodden Democrats have come to believe that whatever magic elixir Clinton is peddling is a surefire cure for the parties maladies. So what if the president in the throes of `triangulation' privately excoriated the high-decibel extremism of Maxine Waters and Jerry Nadler? Such left liberals will defend Clinton to the death, fulminating against a right-wing coup since otherwise, they fear, they will be facing the abyss."

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Taking sides on right-to-carry: One interesting fact revealed this week is the identity of one of those leading the effort to defeat the right-to-carry ballot measure Missourians will confront at the April 6 election. Gov. Mel Carnahan's daughter, Robin, is working for an outfit opposed to extending to Missourians the right enjoyed by a large majority of other Americans in more than 30 other states.

The National Rifle Association has weighed in with a $75,000 contribution, which is a down payment for the campaign to pass the measure. The eyes of the nation will be on Missouri in the days leading up to that election, the first such measure to be put before the voters of any state.

The other side knows the stakes involved, and every liberal editorial writer in the state is having apoplexy at the prospect that Missourians will show the good sense to vote for this natural extension of the right to self-defense. From a longtime right-to-carry supporter, here's hoping that rank-and-file right-to-carry supporters are aware that our fate is in our hands.

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