KINDER'S COMMENTARY: PUTTING MEL'S RECORD INTO A CONTRACT

A couple of months ago, Gov. Mel Carnahan traveled to Washington, D.C., there to sharply criticize the Republican Contract With America. That set me to wondering whether he, or anyone, could have won election had the agenda that Mel Carnahan has actually followed been proposed to voters. The Carnahan Contract With Missouri would have read as follows:

"1. In my first days in office, I will push through a massive tax increase in violation of my promise to take a much smaller such proposal to a vote of the people before enactment. In my first year I will support nearly a half-billion dollars in higher taxes on working Missourians.

"2. I will circumvent the Hancock Amendment to raise these taxes. The year before running for re-election, I will announce Hancock refunds, of an indeterminate amount ascertainable only after the next election, hoping that voters are grateful and stupid enough not to realize that it is their money and that I've overtaxed them.

"3. I will join Hillary Clinton in proposing for our state a universal, government-run health care system that will restrict freedom to choose a doctor. I will boost Speaker Bob Griffin's use of strong-arm tactics to gain House passage of this bill during the session's last week and then urge Senate passage in a late-night session the same evening.

"4. I will support gun control to restrict the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.

"5. I will unionize our schools and all state government through public employee collective bargaining.

"6. I will take license bureaus from local Chambers of Commerce and hand them to my friends.

"7. I will sign anything called `workers' compensation reform' as long as it doesn't attempt to contain litigation costs and can therefore pass muster with my biggest backers: the personal-injury lawyers.

"8. I will sign anything called `welfare reform' as long as it adds programs and costs more money.

"9. I will help block legislative reform and bend House rules in boosting Speaker Griffin's re-election.

"10. To staff my administration, I will go as far away as New Jersey for the most liberal, left-wing appointees in America, such as Director of Insurance Jay Angoff.

"11. I will implement Outcome Based Education in Missouri schools, and when challenged I will deny the charge, claiming that it is `active learning,' `performance learning' or anything but what it actually is. Critics will be demonized as `enemies of the public schools.'

"12. I will appoint as my liberal negotiator a twice-failed attorney general candidate who will work to give away the state's bargaining position in the Kansas City school desegregation case. When, despite our efforts, Missouri is handed a huge win by conservative Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court and an end to the payments is finally in sight, I will claim victory, while working overtime to keep all possible funds flowing to Kansas City.

"13. Ignoring all warnings, I will refuse to add sufficiently to the state's rainy-day fund.

"14. I will support taxpayer-funded abortion by giving tax money to Planned Parenthood, America's busiest abortionist.

"15. Even as private-sector employees work longer to pay for whatever pensions they can afford, I will sign a generous teachers' retirement bill called `25-and-out', which allows 47-year-olds to retire and threatens our pension system.

"16. I will fight for the biggest transfer of power from local school boards to state bureaucrats in the 174 years since Missouri became a state in 1821. This `Outstanding Schools Act' will give our unelected bureaucrats the power to dismiss locally elected school boards, order new elections and even abolish local school districts at their whim. For this I will win praise as `the education governor.'

"17. Even as all America moves away from racial set-asides, I will sign a juvenile crime bill directing judges to use racial quotas in juvenile law.

"18. Clothed in dark suits and a dour demeanor, working hand in glove with the Clintons, I will at all times pose as a moderate or conservative while in actuality being absolutely as liberal as I can get away with."

Peter Kinder is the associate editor of Southeast Missouri and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.