MISSOURI WATCH: CAMPAIGNS: TRASHING CANDICATES GOES FROM BAD TO WORSE

If Missouri voters thought the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1992 was bad, just wait till next year. If citizens grew weary of the television trashing that took place in the last campaign for governor, just wait till the 1996 race gets under way.

The enactment of two conflicting laws on campaign contributions and candidate expenditures, combined with a new ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, coupled with a federal court ruling that portions of existing state laws are unconstitutional have left Missourians gasping for breath and scratching their heads, not to mention puzzled, perplexed and pathological.

Despite a great deal of legislative effort and the best of intentions from a group seeking election reform by way of the initiative referendum, Missouri is, in truth, closer to an electoral emergency today than at any time since 1941. Unless corrective steps are taken, and quickly, it is not difficult to diagnose next year's statewide campaigns as the most confusing, difficult and divisive in decades.

The reason for this is not at all difficult to trace, since candidates before now have at least had some semblance of regulation and have for the most part understood the consequences of pejorative political tactics. That we should now find ourselves in reform limbo, without a paddle or even a clearly constitutional set of rules, gives new meaning to the old expression that no good deed goes unpunished.

With portions of Proposition A, overwhelmingly approved by voters despite dire warnings from not a few experts, now dead and already buried in an unconstitutional landfill, numerous potential candidates for the 1996 contests today find themselves in the position of having already discarded thousands of campaign dollars under a rule they previously thought was in effect. These funds can only be replaced by observing a new set of rules which severely limit individual contributions to worthwhile candidates, making the job of raising even minimally required campaign coffers extremely difficult. So much for the efficacy of good intentions.

Making the matter all the more difficult is a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on anonymous campaign literature, an act that will detract from the ability of candidates to maintain some semblance of rational ethics in campaigns and, even more importantly, will serve to further confuse and alienate citizens seeking to make conscientious decisions about the men and women seeking important state offices.

The negations by both the federal supreme court and district court will give the public even more of a commodity our campaigns have increasingly included: heightened importance of special interests in the political arena. John Q. Public has increasingly recognized the foul hand of selfish interests in public governance, and the chances are that if the average voter is asked to describe what's wrong with the constitutional democracy of America, he'll name first and foremost the emergence of more and more special interests in the state and federal Capitols of the land. This response is not made in a vacuum: there is considerable evidence around all Capitols that special interests exercise an unbelievable amount of influence over government, much to the detriment of the general public.

Neither the 1994-enacted state law (SB 650) nor Proposition A touches on the indelicate matter of how special interests can affect both elections and the results they produce. If candidates are limited to how much they may accept from an individual citizen, special interests retain almost unlimited power to participate in individual campaigns without an iota of regulation. Thanks to the supreme court, they no longer are required to identify themselves or their interests.

A candidate who is burdened with a campaign contribution limitation will now even more readily embrace and countenance the entry of special interest assistance and funds than previously. In many cases, the participation of special interests will determine the success of candidates at the polls, a fact which will in fact lead to even greater demonstrations of gratitude once the candidate is in a position to reciprocate.

Because of an overriding need to guarantee the rights of the First Amendment, effective rules that can withstand judicial review have become almost impossible to enact. The only reasonable solution has been, and remains so today, a system of public campaign financing. The public has long said it won't tolerate this solution, but this short-sightedness leaves voters with a system that is now worse than before. Public acceptance appears possible only when the situation becomes impossible. We're moving closer to that point by the moment.

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