KINDER'S COMMENTARY: `REFORMERS' OVERLOOK FREE-SPEECH GUARANTEES IN ELECTIONS

A friend is a local surgeon and avid outdoorsman who, like me, favors passage in Missouri of a bill already law in more than 30 other states: the right for law-abiding citizens to apply to the local sheriff for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. With characteristic pungency, this friend has listened to those politicians who piously denounce this bill and asks: "What, exactly, does some politician have to fear from a law-abiding citizen who carries a weapon?"

I am reminded of the concise eloquence of Dr. Ricky Lents' rhetorical question when listening to the silly arguments for what we are told we must have: campaign finance reform. These people are out to silence free speech, and increasingly, they don't make any bones about it.

Here -- drawn from my own experience in two campaigns -- is the sort of speech these "campaign finance reformers" want to silence. Both examples are drawn from people who spent money -- one group in 1992 and another in 1996 -- to cause my defeat. Both were, in my view, wrongheaded. And both are absolutely and unconditionally protected by the First Amendment every lawmaker, state or federal, is sworn to preserve, protect and defend.

As a first-time candidate in 1992, I was running against a former first lady of Missouri who was herself a former five-term state representative and her party's nominee for governor four years earlier. In short, she was a household name possessed, according to my campaign's polling, of a vastly superior 94 percent name recognition by the public. Had I not been allowed to raise and spend sums of money greater than she spent, all to communicate my campaign's message, any prayer I might have had of victory would have been as fleeting as an April snowfall.

As we were feverishly engaged in that effort, both candidates filed final pre-election campaign finance reports about 10 days before the election. All candidates of any party who aren't brain-dead eagerly await the filing of these reports, such is the intelligence they offer. That day's intelligence from my opponent's report: The Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys had weighed in with a huge, $5,000 donation to her, such was their abhorrence of my stands for tort reform and against the litigation explosion. I predicted that this would be doubled in the final days, as indeed, post-election disclosures showed. (For the record, I underestimated. The trial attorneys ended up dumping $11,000 against me.)

Then, in the waning days of the '96 campaign, my dear friends at the Sierra Club bought radio time for a series of spots essentially saying that green grass would never grow on my grave, such were my offenses against environmental purity. This one is what is known in the trade as an "independent expenditure," meaning it has no connection with, and isn't approved by, any candidate's campaign.

Make no mistake: "Campaign finance reform" is really about making sure -- damn sure -- that there can never again be another election like that of November 1994, defined as it was by that year's historic Republican tidal wave. Call it the revenge of the (elitist) nerds. No, say the reformers. We can't ever have anything like that again.

Paraphrasing my friend: "What, exactly, does a politician have to fear from an interest group or an individual in a free society who wants to spend money to engage in free speech?"

Sierra Club? National Rifle Association? Trial lawyers? Missouri Right to Life? Bring 'em on, one and all. Don't bother telling the "reformers" but we used to call it freedom.

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