KINDER'S COMMENTARY: MISSOURI DEMOCRATS READILY ACCEPT DONATIONS FROM GAMBLING

Gambling FACT$: Where campaign donations are concerned, gambling dough is plentiful and oh-so-easy. Where stand the two parties in Missouri?

Republican committees in Missouri -- the Missouri Republican State Committee, the House Republican Campaign Committee and the Senate Republican Campaign Committee -- have all refused to accept donations from the gambling industry, despite tempting offers of tens of thousands of dollars in some of the easiest of all money to raise.

Democratic campaign committees are a different story. Official campaign finance reports on file in Jefferson City, and available for inspection to any citizen, show that Democratic committees have received at least $51,500 from the gambling companies for this year's elections. This includes $21,000 to the House Democratic Campaign Committee and $30,500 to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.

Whether you like or dislike a legalized gambling industry that didn't exist in Missouri six years ago and now because of voter approval is a major presence here, do you think politicians should be taking campaign donations from the gambling industry?

I don't. In 1996, campaigning for my own re-election and in need of funds, one day's mail brought an unsolicited check for $500 from a gambling company. I sent it back by return mail.

These are questions Missouri voters should ponder as they consider their votes this Nov. 3.

If we're going to have legalized gambling in Missouri, whom do you want in office regulating and passing laws on the gambling industry? The candidates and officeholders who take their money? Or the ones who, needing funds, nonetheless refuse the tempting offer on principle?

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Republican tax cut wimps: Sometimes party loyalty asks too much. This is such a time.

With a shaky stock market down, at one point, 20 percent from its July highs, people getting their third-quarter 401(k) reports showing they've lost that much or more in 90 days, and business people everywhere fearing the spread of the Asian flu, we're all entitled to ask:

Why did congressional Republicans cave on tax cuts? Couldn't just about everybody this side of a Marxist-leaning faculty lounge agree that it's time for a market-reassuring tax cut in the United States?

How absolutely disgusting that these congressional Republicans, instead of fighting this weakened president on principle, seem still to fear him and his discredited spinmeisters, as a friend said this week, "as though they've been handed a live grenade with the pin removed."

Polls can be fascinating. But we need fewer of them and more real leadership. Besides, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said in his autobiography, "My father always told me: `Douglas, councils of war breed timidity.'"

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's extraordinary action Thursday -- slashing interest rates between regular meetings -- signals he has become convinced that aggressive action is needed to avert the Recession of 1999.

Congressional leaders say they have only an 11-vote GOP margin in the House, and that's true. But the timidity of 1998 doesn't bode well for boldness in the Congress of 1999, whether GOP ranks are swelled two weeks from Tuesday or not. What's a Republican Congress for if its members, including ones cruising toward easy re-elections, won't fight for tax cuts as exactly the tonic needed for a weakening economy?

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