KINDER'S COMMENTARY: NO BACKING DOWN BY THE GOP

Addressing Republican governors this week, Speaker Newt Gingrich stressed the same theme he did upon the GOP's historic landslides of just a year ago. That is to say, he said congressional Republicans will cooperate in trying to reach an agreement with President Bill Clinton but won't compromise on the fundamentals to which they're pledged. Specifically, there will be no deals on tax cuts, the crown jewel of the House Republicans' reform agenda.

One non-negotiable item, Gingrich stressed, is a capital-gains tax cut retroactive to last Jan. 1. He also said Republicans are unwaveringly committed to the $500-per-child tax credit that would mean so much to working families with children. He said he would fight to maintain the $5,000 tax credit for adoptions.

"We will cooperate with the president to reach an agreement, but we will not compromise," said Gingrich.

Good for the speaker. The last of these, especially, doesn't receive the attention it deserves. Why shouldn't government be in the business of encouraging more adoptions and fewer abortions? This is bedrock stuff in any pro-family agenda, and the GOP should stick by its guns.

To paraphrase a famous admiral: Damn the polls. Full speed.

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Speaking of abortion, the recent congressional debate over the gruesome reality of partial-birth abortions was a rare occurrence of the mainstream media actually being forced to face unpleasant realities on this highly charged issue. For the first time in memory, the major national media outlets, both print and electronic, actually had to report the facts to an appalled American public.

Most Americans had probably never heard of this Auschwitz-like procedure, in which a third-trimester baby is pulled nearly all the way out of the womb, leaving only the head still inside, while a doctor inserts scissors into the cranial cavity to make a large opening in the base of the skull. As the tiny baby fights for its life, arms flailing pathetically, the doctor inserts a suction instrument into the cranial opening and suctions out the brains, collapsing the head for easier removal of the now-dying infant.

Rep. Bill Emerson should be proud that he played a key role in the congressional debate that resulted in an overwhelming House to outlaw this procedure. The abortion debate, it would appear, has entered a new and more interesting phase.

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A little-noticed footnote to the off-year elections of 1995 occurred last Saturday in Louisiana, where voters made State Sen. Mike Foster only the second Republican ever elected governor by the landslide margin of 64-36 percent. Foster is an outspoken conservative who until this summer was a lifelong Democrat. He defeated a liberal Democratic congressman by a margin so wide that it is likely to produce yet another party-switch to the GOP by a Louisiana congressman currently calling himself a Democrat.

So at a time when the polls were supposedly turning against Republicans in this fall's budget fight, the results of the gubernatorial elections this year are: Republicans two, Democrats one. It is hard to see how the media can portray these results as a repudiation of the coast-to-coast Republican landslides of last November. In Mississippi, GOP Kirk Fordice, a blunt-spoken conservative governor, becomes the first chief executive in the history of the Magnolia State to succeed himself, by the margin of 56-44 percent. Louisiana, see above. And in Kentucky, a state with a Democratic registration advantage of 65-30 percent, GOPer Larry Forgy lost his bid to become the first Republican to win the governor's mansion in 28 years by a 51-49 margin -- meaning that thousands of Democrats and independents responded to his aggressive campaign by voting for him.

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I note with interest the incessant polling done by the national media on the budget fight between President Clinton and congressional Republicans. Amid hysterical predictions from countless pundits about the dire consequences of a government shutdown, folks who bet their own money every day were registering rather a different sort of verdict on Republican resolve to rein in runaway federal spending. In the first five days of market business after the government shutdown last week, the stock market had risen, as of Tuesday, by approximately 160 points to its all-time high of over 5,000 on the Dow.

As long as we're fixated on polls, we ought to look at this one.

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