MCCAIN'S CAMPAIGN-FINANCE REFORM REGULATES YOUR POLITICAL SPEECH

Everyone who wants to make it against the law to criticize a politician within 60 days of an election should vote for Arizona Sen. John McCain for president. Is that too harsh? No. That's a key part of campaign-finance reform, right there in the McCain-Feingold bill that was, thankfully, defeated by senators who understand your freedoms as an American far better than does John McCain.

McCain believes in restricting, controlling, regulating, limiting your speech in political campaigns. He believes we need less of it. I believe we need more.

Conservative candidates nearly always trail -- or, if they don't trail their opponents, their support is usually understated -- through most of the election season. It is only in late September and the full month of October that conservative candidates begin to pull even and then move ahead of their opponents. Why is this?

Well, those of us on this side of the fence, speaking with long historical experience, are convinced this observable fact exists in significant part because of the liberal slant of the national news media, which echoes themes of Democratic candidates and savages conservatives -- think of what they did to Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork or Bob Dole -- for months on end. It is only in October, when conservative interest groups start spending money in advocacy ads to communicate messages that begin to level the playing field, that center and center-right voters start waking up, and -- in one writer's memorable phrase -- "start riding toward the sound of the guns."

Are you a member of, or sympathetic to, the National Rifle Association? Well, the national news media, echoed by the largest newspapers in this state, have branded you a "special interest." In fact, to the Dan Rathers and the Peter Jenningses, you are an especially sinister special interest they call "the gun lobby." But the NRA is far less a "gun lobby" than it is an organization of law-abiding American citizens who care passionately about preserving Second Amendment rights that predate the founding of this country, and which can be said to have played a large role in that founding.

Are you pro-life? Are you, perhaps drawing on deeply felt religious teaching, involved in this selfless movement that seeks to call Americans away from the culture of death into whose embrace we have so steadily slipped? Well, when the national news media isn't lumping all pro-lifers together with those who murder abortionists, they're portraying you as shrill, humorless fanatics of only a slightly less zealous stripe.

Whether guns or pro-life or any other issue, John McCain is determined to limit your attempts to combine with like-minded believers to communicate your views when it most matters: During the precious days and weeks leading up to the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November in even-numbered years.

Did you want Hillary Clinton's health-care scheme to pass, nationalizing 15 percent of the American economy and turning your health care over to the folks who run the Postal Service and the IRS? If you answered yes, then "campaign finance reform" is for you. The famous "Harry and Louise" ads that awakened Americans to the stakes in Hillarycare and made it DOA in Congress were funded by what the media calls special-interest money.

In 1996, the Sierra Club spent money running ads attacking me in my race for re-election. I believe we used to call it freedom.

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