MISSOURI WATCH: EDSELS SURROUND MISSOURI CAPITOL

If American industry and American government operated under the same set of rules, Ford Motor would still be turning out Edsel cars, with each year seeing the addition of a virtually indiscernible number of modifications, none of them resolving the lack of the model's appeal to the buying public.

Of course, operating under common sense business rules of supply and demand, the Edsel is no longer being manufactured by Ford, while gathering in its demised state a degree of value created by fascination with a fatally flawed product.

If the fate of the Edsel had been under the direction of politically motivated and directed state and federal governments, it would still be available, albeit modified, in dealer showrooms around the country. To be sure, the model would have undergone changes mandated by each session of a legislature or a congress, but the basic design would still be produced today, even if nobody wanted to buy it.

This pattern of redesign rather than reform is simply part and parcel of the operating philosophy that has become a permanent fixture of representative democracy as it's known today. Rather than attack a problem whatever it may be, within the context of reaching an acceptable resolution, our elected leaders have increasingly handled major questions of public policy by amendment, alteration and modification.

The reason for this now firmly entrenched process is that elected officials in both the executive and legislative branches of state and federal governments have a vested interest in postponing the resolution of dilemmas that are not easily and quickly resolved in order to avoid offending a sizable portion of their constituencies. After all, gaining public office in 1999 is not cheap and the maintenance of incumbency requires a major investment of money, time and effort. Thus candidates don't willingly seek to antagonize great gobs of hometown voters by making painful, difficult reforms, even if this is the only logical course for them to take.

Ford, when faced with buyer lethargy, could have decided to make annual changes in the model in the vain hope it would someday gain public approval. It chose not to for the common sense reason that you can make lemonade out of a lemon only if you are basically interested in the final product, not the utilization of excess citrus fruit. The public didn't buy the final product and so the company stopped making it.

Today's politically constructed governments in state and national capitals have adopted a different perspective of product design and buyer popularity, namely that the fewer real solutions offered the better the chance of least disturbing those who will be asked to join in the solution. If a problem can only be resolved by seeking the assistance of a large number of constituents who must make a major contribution in the form of money or power or support, then the prevailing rule is that less painful solutions are preferable.

If you're having a problem recognizing the reluctance of elected officials to attack challenging dilemmas in Jefferson City, let's list a few of them and see how they are being met by candidates who only recently promised their constituents they would protect their interests and solve their complaints.

For starters, there is Missouri's 15-year highway improvement program, started in 1992, and found deficient in its fifth year, delivering a dilemma that has yet to be resolved despite the appointment of advisory groups, legislative probes and gubernatorial review. Putting aside the culpability of professional incompetence, the only logical way to resolve the problem is either to reduce the number of projects originally promised seven years ago or raise sufficient additional taxes to pay for the highway smorgasbord promised unsuspecting motorists when the idea was first proposed.

For the past year however, elected officials on all four Capitol floors have sought to amend this or that portion of the overall plan in order to avoid either of the two choices named above. It's a classic case of the Edsel Syndrome, once again hard at work in Jefferson City.

Let's examine an even more critical unresolved problem than highways: providing a better education for the state's public school children. Now in the first place, this problem should be easier resolved in Missouri than in many other states because of the large number of K-12 pupils enrolled in numerous non-state-supported parochial schools. The education of thousands of young boys and girls enrolled in parochial classrooms costs state taxpayers nothing. Their educations are being paid for by the sponsoring churches and through their parents' tuition payments. If Missouri was forced to educate its present enrollment plus the thousands of kids in parochial schools, we would be last on the list, looking up at Arkansas.

Achieving better educated children is not a deep, dark secret. It's done with exceptional teachers, small class sizes, adequate equipment and all the motivational programs principals can supply. These steps require money and sufficient checks to see they are being fulfilled. The schools, teachers and kids will do the rest.

But that's hardly the end of unresolved problems facing our struggling democratic governments. In Jefferson City, the Edsel-model solution devised to keep qualified state employees, judges, legislators and other officials in their jobs has created more problems than answers. The patched-over dilemma of special interest favoritism and undue lobbyist influence is a cropper. So are proposals offered to reform scandalous campaign practices. So are the proffered answers for environmental destructions of our beautiful state.

There are Edsels parked all the way around our Missouri Capitol.

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