KINDER'S COMMENTARY: POWELL ADMIRER: `PLEASE DON'T RUN FOR PRESIDENT'

A friend returned from Washington, D.C. this week to report that the place is simply going bananas over Colin Powell for President. Even former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, whom I have backed for president for years, and still wish was in the race, is reported to be urging that Powell run as a Republican, pleading with conservatives to stop "carping" at his record.

I am among General Powell's many admirers who also happens to believe he shouldn't run. On the evidence of his book and the interviews he is giving, Gen. Powell has few quarrels with the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Great political campaigns should be about ideas and ideals, overarching causes and programs for reform. We have had a recent president who believed, as Powell apparently does, that politics is essentially personal -- whether or not you are a person of character -- and not about where you stood on issues. His name was George Bush, he didn't believe anything at all on domestic policy, and in his 1992 reelection effort, he received a lower percentage of the popular vote than a Depression-wracked Herbert Hoover did in 1932.

Powell, Bush-like, has a sharp stick to poke in the eye of each of several crucial constituency groupings that gave the GOP its historic landslide last November. This isn't the way to consolidate the enormous gains that saw an astonishing increase of nine million more Republican voters from the off-year elections of 1990 to the off-year elections of 1994, the largest such increase in American history and a sure sign of an American electorate realigning itself into a powerful New Majority.

Racial quotas and set asides in affirmative action? Powell has no real quarrel there; he says he benefitted from these policies in his climb through the Army.

Gun control? Powell, a gun owner, nevertheless stresses that he has no quarrel with registration schemes and some other intrusions upon the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Abortion? He doesn't quarrel with reigning liberal dogma, enshrined by Roe vs. Wade, the terrible 1973 decision, which in a stroke set off another American civil war, this one over values, and in whose wake 30 million unborn children have been done to death by their mothers' "right to choose."

The Gulf War? For all his credit in guiding a winning effort, Gen. Powell counseled President Bush to continue sanctions indefinitely and flatly opposed the use of the troops he commanded. In Texas, they might not say such a man is all hat and no cattle, but such a characterization wouldn't be too far off, either. I say thank God for Lady Margaret Thatcher, who appeared in America just in time with her memorable counsel to the president: "This is no time to go wobbly, George."

Taxes? Economic growth? Reducing the size and intrusiveness of government? On issue after crucial issue that divides liberal Democrats from the new congressional majority, the general is mute, a tabula rasa: [UNIATL.] a blank slate. Indeed, this muteness is no small part of Gen. Powell's appeal. With his only-in-America story, son of immigrants from the East Indies, up from Harlem and all the rest, Powell is a sort of political Rhorshach test: voters can project onto his handsome visage and splendid character whatever qualities and positions you choose, as long as they're attractive.

My hope for the the general is that he stays active with his speaking tour, at $60,000 a crack, and that his book tour is a sensational success.

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