KINDER'S COMMENTARY: MARKS AGAINST CLINTON KEEP GROWING

Let's see now. How would knowledge of certain facts, disclosed to the world only Tuesday of this week, have affected a certain outcome four years ago? This week's facts in a moment; let's first discuss what we knew then.

In 1992, Americans were being wooed by a largely unknown governor of a small southern state in his mid-40s. He was a Rhodes Scholar, we were told, although it was almost never mentioned that he didn't finish that degree program. Brilliantly, his marketing people told us, he was "The Man From Hope." He had, we were told, a brilliant wife -- one who had been named one of the 100 best lawyers in America, in one of those ridiculous polls some magazine puts out. So proud was he of this wife that he boasted that his electoral package was a two-fer: "Vote for me and you get her too."

He was, we were told, a New -- read non-liberal -- Democrat. As proof he presided over several well-publicized executions back in Arkansas. As further proof that he wasn't just another McGovern-Carter-Mondale-Dukakis clone, he pledged "To end welfare as we know it." He'd sign a middle-class tax cut. And so on and on.

That he was a philandering draft-dodger was beyond contest. It was undisputed that he had been abroad during the Vietnam conflict, organizing demonstrations and protesting his country's policies on foreign soil. The disclosure of the infamous letter he wrote a colonel back home -- the one where he said he loathed the military whose commander-in-chief he now sought to be, the one where he said all his maneuvering was to "preserve my political viability", the one in which he misled that colonel about his draft status and intentions -- would have killed any candidate less extraordinarily gifted in the rhetorical arts.

His demise was predicted again and again. But nothing could stop Bill Clinton, the protean candidate. Not even the realization that owing to his shameful maneuvering to avoid his duty, some other poor soul -- no Rhodes Scholar, but rather a blue collar family's son -- answered his country's call to duty, perhaps paying with his life. All so that Bill and Hillary could maintain their "political viability."

With the mighty Reagan coalition sundered in the first post-Cold War election essentially understood as the firing of George Bush for breaking his no-new-taxes pledge, all this was enough. Enough, that is, to elect this Arkansas governor president of the United States with the same roughly 43 percent of the vote that Democratic presidential nominees had been getting since 1968. That it was millions of votes fewer than Michael Dukakis had earned four years earlier in losing to Bush didn't matter either.

So how about this week's disclosures? Might they have changed the outcome? How about these: 1) That the Clintons' business partners right up through that very '92 election are felons. 2) That his hand-picked successor is a felon, resigning his post, headed for the penitentiary. 3) That they're guilty on 24 of 30 felony counts. 4) That the savings and loan these characters looted in order to stick taxpayers with the tab was a criminal enterprise represented by a lady whose name had made the roster of the nation's most distinguished lawyers: Hillary Rodham Clinton. 5) That in two weeks, another felony trial will begin in Arkansas that implicates then-Gov. Clinton even more closely, when two Arkansas bankers face charges for illegally funding the most recent Clinton gubernatorial campaign. 6) That more indictments are certain.

Every mother's child learns we're judged by the company we keep. As the White House spin doctors spin their way through these, and Hillary spouts her pieties, millions of Americans are engaged in one gigantic horse laugh.

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