MISSOURI WATCH: AMERICA'S GARDENS OF GOOD AND EVIL

Political aficionados have long been told that all politics is local. This was a favorite theme of former U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, and to some extent, his words carry a certain validity. Rejection of the O'Neill rule most often comes from those who disdain American politics in general and the behavior of political players in particular.

As much as we might reject O'Neill's premise, much of what passes for capital politics today, both in Jefferson City and Washington, seems very close to being a reflection of human behavior in hometowns across America.

There's a perfectly logical explanation for this: those engaged in politics and the business of running federal and state governments come not from some offshore island where they are trained in the bacchanalian political arts of persuasion, compromise and even deceit, but from hundreds of hometowns across Missouri and the nation as a whole.

These political players are, in other words, a representative cross-section of the American people, and like it or not, they reflect, albeit on a much larger and more visible scale, the life and times of the John and Jane Q. Publics who live and work in hundreds of communities in the land.

It is impossible to assign to each political figure in Jefferson City or Washington the degree to which years spent in political wars have changed his or her political nature. We are, after all, the sum total of our experiences, and each of us passes through numerous phases of physical and mental maturity that produce variances in behavior. Just as men are changed by war and its awful consequences of pain and death, humans are changed by specific incidents and influences that give us different perspectives on life in general.

It is safe to say, as Thurman Arnold did in a 1935 book entitled "The Symbols of Government," that the American public "often holds preconceived faiths about fundamental principles of government, causing us to denounce new ideas, and even new officials, as new ideas are introduced." Dr. Arnold suggests that Americans, because they have enjoyed the fruits of a democratic society and have even taken this society for granted, hold what he calls "preconceived principles that all too often are considered more important than practical results."

In other words, citizens can be guilty of placing undue emphasis on method rather than substance. Elected officials who fail to follow our own preconceived notions of how challenges should be met are often pelted with a barrage of criticism, not because their programs have been found wanting but because their proposed solutions are at variance with ours.

For anyone interested in public governance, conversations with political figures who have returned to former pursuits after a long stint in some marble-encased capitol are more instructive and many times more enlightening than interviewing someone still performing in some ring of the American political circus. Over the years I have listened to scores of former public officials, from city halls to the federal capital, and have found them to be more logical than they seemed to be while holding office, far more reflective of their true value and worth to the public and much more amenable to confessing their own mistakes.

It is possible to find these same personal philosophies around coffee tables in hundreds of communities among those who have spent their lives in other pursuits, from running small and large companies to standing on a factory production line to planting and harvesting corn, wheat, soybeans and cotton.

Remarkably, the men and women whose careers have been spent in government and those who have labored in other fields are virtually identical. One could hardly guess their chosen profession as they express their true beliefs and discuss the challenges in their lives.

Today's citizens who are engaged in vocations other than politics like to believe those who serve them in some official capacity are of lesser stature, with fewer moral values and less inclination to follow high-minded principles. This belief is always reinforced when someone, say the President of the United States, is assigned some deadly sin that would bar him from polite company. Those who hold lesser positions are perhaps given even less leeway, if only because the consequences of their actions appear less demeaning. But regardless of the hierarchy, there is a tendency to disparage not only the individual but the structure of government, with guilt often attached to the innocent as well as the guilty.

It would not be accurate to say each political figure has a counterpart in Hometown U.S.A., for background and personal experiences produce differing individuals, but for every intolerant ideologue in Washington, we can be reasonably certain that his philosophical twin exists in communities elsewhere. For every liberal in Washington, there is an ideological clone back home, and for every conservative in Jefferson City, there are like-minded citizens to be found everywhere in the state.

Anyone who believes Washington and Jefferson City hold all the womanizers, substance abusers, alcoholics, cheats, bigamists, con artists and liars simply hasn't been listening to the hometown gossip line.

But the important point is that all of the positive characteristics that we Americans find in our hometown and in our daily lives can be found just as readily in our state and federal capitals. The honest, conscientious, family loving, moral, hard working individuals you see each day also live in Jefferson City and Washington. I couldn't venture, nor do I believe anyone could, the proportional mix of good and evil in the various "gardens" of America.

Anyone willing to assign such proportional differences will probably be wrong about other facts as well.

Jack Stapleton of Kennett is editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.