KINDER'S COMMENTARY: REPEAT AFTER ME: IT ISN'T ABOUT GENE COPELAND. IT ISN'T ABOUT...

The dustup over vote-buying in Bootheel elections is both interesting and amusing on many levels.

Repeat after me: It isn't about Gene Copeland. It isn't about Gene Copeland. It isn't about Gene Copeland. Never was. Nobody who matters much accused my friend Gene of personally buying votes.

What it is about is a way of doing business since time immemorial in Missouri's Bootheel. Here is how Mike Jensen of the Sikeston Standard-Democrat phrased the matter this week:

"Stories abound in this area of days when political operatives would round up voters with the promise of whiskey or money and deliver voters to the polling booths. Those stories are true, and they occurred in our community and others south to the Arkansas border. Most thought those days were long gone until this week when a Democratic worker entered a guilty plea to just such activities in the November 1996 elections. ... To think otherwise is foolish. ...

"In some quarters of the Bootheel the practice of buying votes ... has long been a way of life. ... Black voters are targeted for this illegal practice going back decades. November 1996 ... was no exception."

The Bootheel machine, the legendary J.V. Conran, boss, was awe-inspiring -- near invincible. Conran's New Madrid County was its heart. In Democratic primaries, they hauled sharecroppers around in trucks and voted them at every precinct. Some came across the river from Cairo to exercise their right to vote. With machine blessing, you came roaring out of those Cotton Counties with 10-1 and 12-1 margins, sometimes even more. Leading Democratic politicians from Jefferson City used to make a special trip to New Madrid. Purpose: To ask J.V. "if it might be OK to run for governor." This was in the days before statewide voter registration, which we didn't have until 1973.

Read up on Harry Truman. He benefited from a closeness to J.V. Conran in his 1934 and 1940 senate campaigns. This didn't make Truman, or the other beneficiaries of Conran's backing, personally corrupt.

Three or four years ago, former U.S. Sen. Tom Eagleton regaled an audience at a dinner in Columbia of the Historical Society of Missouri. Eagleton's subject that memorable evening: The time-tested techniques of hauling Democratic primary voters in St. Louis, Kansas City and the Bootheel. It was an evening of great hilarity among the distinguished audience, now that the statute of limitations has long since run.

Check certain Democratic primary election victories. Check Warren Hearnes against poor old Jimmy Kirkpatrick in the 1960 primary for secretary of state. Kirkpatrick, the popular newspaperman, carried something like 106 or 107 of Missouri's 114 counties. He lost to State Rep. Hearnes, then representing Mississippi County. Hearnes' overwhelming strength: The Bootheel, plus St. Louis City and Jackson County. A young Tom Eagleton, running for attorney general from the City of St. Louis that same year, showed a similar winning pattern against an opponent who carried the vast majority of counties. Tom was in with J.V.

So this week we had a guilty plea by poor old Lester Gillespie for whatever went on two years ago this November. Could he be the small-fry fall guy for a U.S. attorney from St. Louis' distinguished Dowd family?

Me? I doubt we have been told, or perhaps ever will be told, the whole story.

My guess is there's a joker in there somewhere.

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