KINDER'S COMMENTARY: GEPHARDT OFFERS TWISTED LOGIC ON FIGHTER DECISION

McDonnell-Douglas has long been Missouri's largest employer, its fate linked inextricably with the economy of our state. Founded in 1940 by the legendary James "Mr. Mac" McDonnell, the company put the Show Me State on the map through its world-class leadership in advanced fighter aircraft and through the Mercury and Gemini programs of the 1960s.

Last week brought a tough blow to the proud aerospace giant in the form of its exclusion from competition for the huge contract for the advanced Joint Strike Fighter.

The aftermath of the Pentagon decision to exclude McDonnell-Douglas wasn't without comic -- or rather tragic -- relief. The estimable Rep. Richard Gephardt, House Minority Leader and putative presidential candidate four years hence, weighed in with some unforgettable comments. Gephardt, now confirmed for another two years in the House minority, had spent a couple of years leading a lobbying effort to influence Defense Department officials to include McDonnell in the contract. Here he differed from congressional honchos from California and the state of Washington, who mounted no such effort for their more fortunate, home-state companies, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.

In any event, when last Saturday brought the disappointing news, leaving the huge McDonnell factory a "morgue," according to one newspaper account, Gephardt struck a new chord: The United States doesn't need any such advanced fighter, he intoned. Gephardt's suggestion: We can better spend the funds on liberal social programs of the sort that have failed so dismally and simply devastated so many of America's inner cities.

Any list of such cities must especially and emphatically include Gephardt's native St. Louis, which as recently as 1950, before liberal social engineers got it by the throat, was a bustling city of 850,000. Today, the city's population is about 360,000 and falling, as terrified middle-class families flee to St. Charles, Jefferson and other ex-urban counties, the better to get as far as possible from a corrupt liberal regime and its foreseeable effects. (Midnight basketball recently has meant the disappearance through embezzlement of $120,000 in our once-great urban neighbor.)

The catastrophe of St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe housing project, long-since dynamited into oblivion, will forever symbolize the failure of liberal, collectivist social engineering. (My colleague and close Senate friend, Steve Ehlmann of St. Charles, notes half-whimsically that a problem with America as opposed to other regimes, is that we have no purges. Though elections come and go, with new officeholders nominally in charge, the guys who thought up and then built Pruitt-Igoe, don't get fired, or even effectively reprimanded. They remain, promoted, or graduate to a cushy position on the staff of, say, Richard Gephardt.)

Gephardt's comments, then, establish a new archetype in the pathetic pantheon of American liberalism, amazing even for him. Still more sheer nonsense from the man who, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd noted so devastatingly, once believed that darkening his eyebrows would help elect him president. One can't help recall that McGovernite Democrats spent the 1970s arguing that we didn't need and couldn't afford the advanced weapons that our men and women of Desert Storm wielded so magnificently, and with an economy of casualties unmatched in the history of warfare. Gephardt is a fitting heir to those hapless, anti-defense left-wingers.

Speaking of Desert Storm, recall that Gephardt opposed it, even going so far as to threaten to lead an effort to cut off funds supporting our troops out in the desert. I stand by a forecast made in this space during the congressional debate over our troop deployment, in which the Gephardt-led faction adopted a pacifist position to the left of the United Nations: No congressional "leader" who voted against authorizing the Desert Storm operation will ever be elected president. Republicans can take little comfort, however. The Democrats will never nominate Dick Gephardt. Should he seek the nomination, Gephardt will be easily dispatched by the slightly more centrist Vice President Albert Gore who, it will be remembered, distinguished himself by being among the tiny handful of Senate Democrats who voted for Desert Storm.

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