LOOK AT WHO REALLY LOSES IN THE PRIMARY

Who would have expected Missouri's 1992 primary campaign, with its abundance of candidates and multitude of state problems to be addressed, could have ended up being one of the dreariest in years? With 57 candidates for statewide office, including 14 just for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, the perfectly normal expectation was that voters would have an opportunity to choose party nominees after a comprehensive discussion of the issues and the office seekers' proposed solutions to the major problems facing the state.

Wrong!

What this year's primary delivered was a long series of broken promises to "deal with the issues" and a barrelful of bromides that promised "jobs" and "welfare reform" with only a slight bow to the real facts to be faced. There wasn't a candidate for statewide office, and probably very few for legislative posts, that didn't stress new employment opportunities and an end to both perceived and imagined welfare abuse.

Not to be forgotten was the basic issue of "education." As it turned out, all the candidates in this year's primary are for it. Surprise! We have yet to hear an office seeker come out strongly against reading, writing and arithmetic, although most certainly not 100 percent of them can spell all three words.

Most, but not all, of the gubernatorial candidates eventually began to spell out some proposals, although voters had to strain very hard to find an original idea among the platforms of these candidates.

Let us know if we missed one, but we failed to read a single innovative idea for creating more than a handful of new jobs in the state for the next four years. One of the candidates based much of his economic development suggestions on greater use of ethanol, creating what he said would be higher income for Missouri's agricultural economy.

He was about 12 years too late; the state has long ago done what it could to boost crop production with alcohol-infused fuel, only to find its efforts stymied by economic realities not to mention a bunch of new environmental regulations that do nothing to assure any future for this development plan.

Just about every statewide candidate talked about welfare reform, although the emphasis was most usually to call attention to "widespread abuses" in the state's social service system. The most popular solution to this problem was to "require welfare families to get the training and education they need to lift themselves off the public dole."

What no one bothered to mention in all of those position papers that came sprawling out of campaign headquarters around the state was that Missouri has more applicants for welfare job training than funds appropriated for this program. In other words, the welfare recipients want the assistance the candidates say they shall have but the state hasn't been willing to accommodate them.

As for the terribly troubling problem of raising both the economic and moral levels of unmarried mothers, the only solution that we saw offered was to deprive ADC families some portion of their welfare checks. The "solution" of starving young children to penalize their mothers for il~legitimacy is a carryover from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, where the practice worked effectively against minorities and other "enemies" of the government.

Education had to have been the most commonly mentioned problem facing the state, and with just reason, yet the solutions were hardly intellectual in nature. Some candidates favored a voucher system for all families, permitting "choice" in selecting schools, both private and public.

It's a great idea, one being currently promoted by our education president, yet the Bush administration's proposals are unrealistically expensive if fully implemented, and neither party is talented enough to make us believe more money can be found when Uncle Sam is running $400 billion in debt every budget year.

In Missouri we have similar problems in implementing any new proposal to improve public education: we don't have enough money. The reasons we are short of cash are numerous: we're a low-tax state, we are spending millions of dollars each year on desegregation charges in just two school districts, and too many of our leaders over too many years have lacked the commitment or the political courage to lead the state out of its dismal national school rankings.

Only one gubernatorial candidate in this year's primary even chose to address this particular aspect of the state's public education dilemma. His solution was to increase state tax collections over a four-year period, and while it was hardly an original idea, it at least had an element of honesty to it.

The plan was promptly attacked by all of the other candidates in both parties, none of whom would even consider the alternative of tax increases until they were confronted with it while sitting in the executive office.

Missourians heard an awful lot about honesty and integrity and moral leadership in this campaign, yet the number of candidates willing to display these qualities while discussing the future of the state and what may be needed in the future was virtually zero.

Candidates who are unwilling to admit that if faced with serious revenue shortfalls they will raise taxes may claim they are honest but are they? Candidates who will not consider regulatory reform against special interests that provide them with huge campaign contributions may claim integrity but do they really possess it? Candidates who will not level with voters during a campaign to avoid antagonizing as many of them as possible may claim to have moral leadership but do they really possess it?

We have witnessed politics-as-usual during this year's primary campaign, and despite the hope expressed by so many at the start of this period, we have seen no improvement in electoral dialogue. Instead we voters have been provided the usual fare of attack and destroy television and radio commercials that reduce participatory democracy to its lowest common denominator.

Sadly we have to declare the real losers of this year's primary to be the citizens of Missouri.