KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WHEAT SHOWS HIS LIBERAL STRIPES

By their friends, goes the old adage, we shall know them.

That venerable wisdom came to mind with this week's announcement that former (1983-95) Missouri Congressman Alan Wheat will be deputy campaign manager for President Bill Clinton's re-election campaign. Highly articulate, earnest and with an appealing, even classy presence, Wheat forcefully represented the majority white (if overwhelmingly Democratic) 5th District in Kansas City. In 1994, he abandoned that safe seat to enter the race for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Sen. Jack Danforth. Wheat ran poorly, losing to John Ashcroft by a 59-41 percent margin. At Wednesday's ceremony announcing Wheat's appointment, President Clinton, speaking with a straight face and with no apparent irony, said of Wheat that he "builds coalitions wherever he goes." Well.

Alan Wheat remains the most liberal candidate ever nominated for statewide office by either major party in the 175 years since Missouri became a state in 1821. Is that stating more than the facts allow? Consider the undisputed facts:

In 1994, Roll Call, which calls itself "the newspaper of Capitol Hill," rated all 435 members of Congress and assigned them a ranking from No. 1 (most liberal) to No. 435 (most conservative). In a rating he never disputed, Alan Wheat scored No. 13 -- the 13th most liberal member of the most liberal Congress in recent history, probably ever. (For the record, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California -- the infamous apologist for the Los Angeles hoodlums and thugs who rioted back in 1992 -- was No. 1, while closer to Wheat's neighborhood was Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the chamber's only avowed socialist, at No. 7.)

During his career, in a pattern that would have landed you or me in jail, Alan Wheat bounced 86 checks at the House bank. He not only favors abortion on demand, but also compulsory taxpayer funding of same, which is opposed by more than 60 percent of Americans and an even larger majority of Missourians. He opposes the death penalty, and in 1994 he voted to abolish it through a racial-quotas-in-sentencing bill that was opposed by 30 state attorneys general, including Democrat Jay Nixon of Missouri.

Pay and perks for officeholders? In 12 years in office, Alan Wheat voted to increase his own pay 12 times. He opposed every effort to reduce funding of free mailings for House members and even opposed efforts to eliminate funding for operators on automatic elevators in the House. He stoutly opposed term limits, grafted onto the Missouri Constitution by a 72 percent supermajority in 1992.

Gays in the military? Wheat voted yes and opposed a more conservative amendment by Rep. Ike Skelton of Lexington, the last remaining Harry Truman Democrat in the Missouri delegation. Wheat opposed President George Bush's commitment of troops to Desert Storm.

Gun owners rights? No Missouri politician ever showed more contempt, even opposing a sense-of-the-Congress resolution declaring that the Second Amendment guarantees all law-abiding citizens the right to keep and bear arms.

President Clinton is desperately trying to convince Americans that the Republican Congress swept in by the 1994 landslide is dominated by anti-abortion, Christian Right "extremists." Missourians will recognize the true face of extremism in the president's deputy campaign manager, as they do in that same president's veto of the partial-birth abortion bill. After all, Alan Wheat now devotedly serves a president who stands up four-square for sticking scissors into the skull of a full-term baby as it is passing through the birth canal, expanding the scissors to enlarge a gaping hole and inserting a catheter and sucking out the brains, so as to facilitate the skull's collapse and the emergence of a tiny corpse. A cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church asks, "If we now deny the humanity of a baby in the process of being born, who is next? The aged? The infirm? The retarded?" As the great Paul Greenberg observed, hauntingly, it's now "open season on fetuses."

"Who," asks a Wall Street Journal editorial, "are the extremists now?"

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