KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WHO CAN WIN THESE DAYS? CHARACTER STILL MATTERS

In 1992, recall, sober voices in the national media tried to tell us that character didn't matter. It was "the economy, stupid," in the famous phrase of Clinton campaigners. In their all-but-explicit repudiation of their own sitting president, Democratic candidates across America are themselves providing the definitive refutation of that drearily conventional "wisdom." There's no other conclusion: Character does matter.

So, what kind of Democrat can win elections these days? From 1995's elections comes the answer: Conservative ones. A telling sign is President Clinton's feverish attempt to reposition himself as the kind of New -- read non-liberal -- Democrat he said he was in 1992.

In the Missouri statehouse, since the nationwide electoral earthquake of Nov. 8, 1994, word went out from Gov. Mel Carnahan to all Democrats: Announce your support for market-based solutions for whatever ails our health care system, back off the gun control stuff and don't even propose anything resembling a tax or fee hike. This from folks who spent their first two years in office pushing gun control, dumping nearly a half-billion dollars in higher taxes on Missourians and fighting for a government takeover of our health care system.

In fact, look around you at what Democratic candidates are doing to woo voters and you are witness to the sweeping triumph of conservative ideas. Conservatism is everywhere triumphant, and to its tenets, in one form or another, literally every knee is bending. Liberalism truly is the philosophy that dare not speak its name.

Thus we have victorious Democrat Paul Patton, now the governor-elect of Kentucky after a campaign in which he ran rightward from beginning to end. Patton's narrow (51 percent-49 percent) win in a state with a 2-1 Democratic registration advantage followed a campaign in which he didn't just distance himself from President Clinton, he positively insulted his leader. Patton, whose aggressive TV campaign positioned him as "a different kind of Democrat," pledged not to support his president in next year's election if Clinton keeps up the anti-tobacco stuff so deeply offensive to Kentuckians.

This year's campaigns did differ from last year's in one important respect: 1995 saw no shrill Democratic attacks on the Religious Right. Desperately seeking to save himself from the surging evangelical vote so lethal to Democrats, candidate Patton said he is a conservative, Bible-believing Christian. Nervous about Cinton's support for gun control, Patton used precious, last week campaign hours to make a much-publicized purchase: A gun. Pressed to the wall by a sharp GOP attack on the Democrat-passed Kentucky Education Reform Act, Patton didn't defend outcome-based education, but rather announced he would "fix KERA."

In Kentucky, like Missouri a border state with strong conservative leanings, it would appear a member of Bill Clinton's party can still eke out a win if he campaigns as a right-winger. Out in California, I hope the Gipper is smiling.

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