KINDER'S COMMENTARY: GOVERNOR'S TACTIC: NO NEW TAXES

Monday afternoon we will return to business in Jefferson City for the second full week of the legislative session. Wednesday, we senators will cross the third floor to the House chamber for a joint session, there to hear the annual state-of-the-state message from Gov. Mel Carnahan.

It being an election year, the governor is a lead-pipe cinch to talk as conservatively as possible. Expect lots of tough talk: Prisons? We're building more of them. Sex offenders? Here's a new proposal. Juvenile crime? We passed a bill. (Don't expect any mention of the racial-quotas provision buried in it, which is horrifying judges across Missouri as they awaken to it.)

The governor who in his first year rammed through huge tax increases without the public vote he had promised while wooing voters just months before, put out a new line last year, following the Republican landslides of November 1994. The new Carnahan line to appointees and fellow Democrats: Don't even think about tax or fee increases of any description. After all, when Mel Carnahan had rested from his labors that first year in office, his tax hikes had dumped nearly a half-billion dollars of higher taxes on working Missourians. The taxing they did in the first year; the next three years were for talking conservative and touting a balanced state budget.

(Speaking of balanced budgets, as with most states, Missouri's constitution mandates a balanced one. When the issue of such a constitutional mandate arose last year in the U.S. Senate, the overwhelmingly popular measure failed of adoption by one vote after no fewer than six Democrats who'd claimed they favored it and previously voted for it switched to opposition.)

In the second year of his term, Mel Carnahan shoved in all his chips trying to enact a state version of the Clinton health care scheme. The grand plan: To effect a government takeover of our health care system. With former Speaker Bob Griffin doing his damndest, enough arms were twisted to ram it narrowly through the House. The same evening, we senators took the bill up, as the governor sat in the gallery, practically demanding that we pass the bill, rather in the fashion of the Cuban parliament getting handed a bill from Fidel. Instead, we saved the governor from himself and killed the crackpot measure.

Within a month of the November 1994 GOP landslide, Carnahan appointees were trotting before a committee on which I sit with a health care message 180 degrees in the other direction. Thus from Carnahan appointee Dr. Colleen Kivlahan, director of the department of health, our astonished committee heard this: "Over the last year, we as a state and nation have made a collective decision to allow the market to rule in health care." Similar chatter came from the mouth of Carnahan appointee Jay Angoff, director of the department of insurance. Carnahan had to go all the way to New Jersey to find Angoff, where he had worked as a left-wing functionary in a tiny corner of Ralph Nader's far-flung empire.

The Carnahan formula: Talk conservative, especially at election time. But govern left, far enough to satisfy the fractious constituencies of what remains of today's Democratic Party.

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Jefferson City Quote of the Week, from Sen. William L. Clay Jr, D-St. Louis, speaking of the House Black Caucus, which held up the vote on electing a new speaker:

"They are sick and tired of not getting any ... respect and any ... spoils of being in the majority party."

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