KINDER'S COMMENTER: ARKANSAS, ILLINOIS RACES ARE IMPORTNAT TO U.S. SENATE VOTING

Here's an early line on some of next year's key U.S. Senate races:

Ordinarily, one would think that the ascendancy of a president from a small state should coincide with strength for that president's party at home. Such is definitely not the case with President Bill Clinton, notwithstanding the fact that he is the first Democratic president to win re-election to a second term since FDR 60 years ago.

Arkansas is seeing a resurgence of Republican strength in a state where the GOP had been so small as to be nearly non-existent since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Along with former Clinton business partners Jim and Susan McDougal, Clinton's successor, former Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, was convicted of multiple felonies. Tucker's replacement: Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican and ordained Baptist minister who spoke here a couple of years ago when he was Lt. Governor. From nowhere, Republicans have picked up congressional seats and last year, the first Republican U.S. senator since Reconstruction in Tim Hutchinson. Now comes this report on the other Arkansas Senate seat from the estimable Robert Novak, one of the most enterprising and credible of America's shoe-leather political reporters:

"Democratic Despondency

"National Democratic strategists were taken by unpleasant surprise when 71-year-old Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas announced he would no seek re-election next year, making the Republican Party a clear favorite to capture the seat.

"Bumpers himself would have faced a tough road for re-election to a fifth term from a state that has been trending Republican. But any other Democrat will be a decided underdog.

"The party strategists now fear that Republicans will pick up the five additional seats necessary for the 60 votes required to cut off Democratic filibusters. Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky and Arkansas are now rated probable GOP Senate takeovers, with lower chances to gain seats in Washington, California and Wisconsin. The only probable Democratic takeover is in Indiana."

Speaking of Illinois, key party sources tell me that popular two-term Gov. Jim Edgar will definitely run for the Senate seat now held by Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, an incumbent widely seen as weak and likely to fall. The expected entry of Edgar has GOP operatives smiling and helps to explain the other side's "despondency," as Novak puts it.

And that leads us to Missouri, where we will undoubtedly see another barnburner in Sen. Kit Bond's re-election bid next year. Missouri's senior senator is off to his best start ever in early fund raising with over $1.2 million on hand in reports soon to be disclosed. That's when we will get a look at the fund-raising prowess of Bond's challenger, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon.

Bond has won consistently since stumbling to an upset loss to Joe Teasdale back in 1976, but for a variety of reasons, he hasn't won big margins in any recent race. Enter Nixon, who last year led the Democratic ticket in racking up huge victory margins against a classy but little-known and badly under-financed opponent.

The Bond-Nixon race will offer Missourians a clear contrast between Sen. Bond, one of the most effective champions of small business anywhere, and Nixon. Big Labor has all but announced an intention to buy the seat for Nixon, with an early AFL-CIO endorsement, big money pledges and attempts to scotch intra-party opposition. All this occurred amid a remarkable treatment of Nixon headlined "No Way Jay" in last weekend's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, describing disaffection and outright opposition to the Nixon candidacy from black Democrats upset with his actions on desegregation cases.

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