KINDER'S COMMENTARY: TAX CUT MUST BE DOLE'S MESSAGE

If any doubt remained that the road to presidential victory for Bob Dole lies in a bold, across-the-board tax-cutting plan, the events of the last five weeks or so have dispelled it. The former Senate majority leader has spent much of these precious days flailing about like a fish in a rowboat, defending an offhand comment about whether nicotine is addictive. In doing so, he veered sharply "off-message," as the political consultants phrase it. When it began to appear that the former Kansas senator might finally be putting that particular fiasco behind him, he gets pummeled by a carefully laid trap set by a former left-wing Democratic member of Congress named Kweisii Infume.

Infume left Congress to join the scandal-rocked National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as its president. In so doing, he continued a 30-year trend of this once-glorious organization, away from the undisputed heroism of its past and toward hard-edged, left-wing power politics, nothing more than an adjunct of the left wing of the national Democratic Party.

In careful coordination with White House and Democratic National Committee operatives, Infume released to the media the fact that Dole had been invited to speak to the national convention of the NAACP, but had turned down the chance. NAACP leaders, echoed by a chorus of Democratic operatives, then spent a couple of days trumpeting their dismay at being thus stiffed by Dole. Media coverage flowed, heaven-sent, for the Clinton White House.

Consider this fact: In the 30 or more years since the NAACP was taken over, at the national level, by extreme liberal leadership, qualifying it for being called the National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People, no Republican presidential candidate has ever addressed this meeting. It is a simple fact that Republicans have had to fashion different means of trying to reach African-American voters. Placed in this historical context, then, you begin to see how complete was the sandbag job thus prepared for Dole by Infume and his White House allies. A nice piece of political jujitsu, then, sufficient to capture most of the herd of independent minds that pass for today's national media honchos. Hardly, however, the stuff on which a great presidential contest will turn.

Any presidential contest with an incumbent in the race is, almost by definition, a referendum on that incumbent. That, and a host of other practical considerations, leads us to tax cuts. They are, unmistakably, both Bill Clinton's Achilles' heel and the magic potion for GOP victory.

A bold program of Reagan-style, across-the-board tax cuts for all working Americans will unite every diverse element of the majority Republican coalition, recently dubbed the "Leave-Us-Alone Coalition." Gun owners. Property rights folks. Family values and parental rights activists. The Christian Right. Home schoolers. Economic conservatives. Buchananites. Perotistas. Right-to-Lifers. All will respond favorably to a bold tax-cutting program that says to the average working American: "We trust you to spend more of your income, and the other side doesn't. We want to put it back in your pocket and they want to take even more. Who would you rather have in office?"

Against any bold proposal, Bill Clinton's phony, $1,500 tax credit for college tuition will be seen as the small beer that it clearly is. A key point of contrast: In the Clinton proposal, Democrats say, "You get a tax break if you do what WE want you to with the money." The Dole-led GOP response must be: "Here's an across-the-board tax cut and money in your pocket. Spend it. Save it. Invest it. Do with it what you will."

That's a message that can turn today's double-digit Clinton lead into a dead-even race by convention time next month and, by the night of Nov. 5, will produce a 40-state sea of Republican blue on Dan Rather's electoral map of America. Bill Clinton, who campaigned promising a middle-class tax cut and then passed the largest income-tax increase in American history without a single Republican vote, also slapped every American with a 4.3-cent gasoline tax hike. It's all out there for Dole. Will he grasp his historic chance? If not, there'll be lots of time for reflection, back on the porch in Russell, Kan.

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