MISSOURI WATCH: WE HARDLY KNEW YE, ANDY JACOBS

If I weren't a Missourian, I'd like to be living in the 1Oth Congressional District of Indiana. It's not that I'm a huge Hoosier fan, although I've known some nice people from Indiana and have enjoyed Indianapolis the few times I've dropped in. I'd enjoy being a resident of the 1Oth District in Indiana because I'd be represented in Congress by Andy Jacobs Jr.

Never heard of him? I hadn't either until a friend in Washington asked whether I was saddened by the announced retirement of Andy Jacobs? "Who's Andy Jacobs?" I asked, a question that brought an unprintable expletive from my Beltway interrogator. "Where have you been?" he asked in a tone usually reserved for an INS customs officer questioning a Laredo Latino wearing running shoes.

So I began doing the usual background check on the Honorable Gentleman from Indiana's 1Oth Congressional District and discovered to my amazement this was the public official I had been searching for since a child. Except for a two-year interregnum during the Nixon sweep of 1972, Andy Jacobs has been in Congress since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson won the presidency by implying Barry Goldwater was going to nuke little children who carried flower baskets and walked in daisy fields. This means Andy Jacobs has been in Congress for 30 years, fighting battles that few ever heard about and no national reporters ever mentioned.

To put it as simply as possible, Andy Jacobs is my kind of congressman, and if we had 434 others like him, believe me we'd have the kind of government most of us have long ago despaired of getting.

For starters, Congressman Jacobs insists on receiving the same salary he got when he first went to Washington 32 years ago. Believe it or not, he returns 41 percent of his salary check to the U.S. Treasury, insisting that the paycheck he received in 1964 ($79,000) could not be legally increased to the current $133,000 per annum. No wonder Andy isn't the most popular guy in the nation's most exclusive club.

A wounded Marine veteran of the Korean War, Jacobs refuses to accept a disability check to which he's entitled, returning it to the Treasury along with his salary refund.

Rep. Jacobs not only has one of the smallest staffs in Washington, he refuses to increase it, saying that if he added more people they would only find more useless work to perform. He also refuses to hire a press secretary, considered an absolute necessity in the Capitol, because he believes he should speak for himself and not hire someone to do it for him. Despite the absence of a media flak, the Jacobs office displays a cardboard sign that reads, "Kindness Spoken Here." Now there's a language seldom spoken in Washington.

The Indiana Democrat has never gone on a junket and has never accepted a fee for a speech. He refuses to let a lobbyist pick-up his lunch or dinner ticket, insisting on paying for his own meals. Incidentally, the few like Jacobs who insist on paying their own restaurant bills are considered quaint and slightly touched in the head by their political brethren.

Jacobs has supported a balanced budget amendment since 1976 and included in his version is the added requirement that Congress make provisions to begin to retire the national debt, now touching $5 trillion.

It's difficult for me to find any disagreement at all with any of Jacobs' positions. He has introduced bills that would prohibit members of Congress from accepting payment for speeches, that would require seat belts in school buses, that would demand more nutritional school lunches, that would severely restrict political contributions, that would limit taxpayer-funded junkets and even one that would change the national anthem to "America the Beautiful."

Every session he introduces a bill to do away with the millions spent on former presidents, preferring to spend the money on widows and children of slain police officers. He wrote the law which stopped Social Security payments to prison inmates, and he has long favored limits on Medicare payments to doctors. The latter earned him an opponent sponsored by the American Medical Association, whose PAC spent $300,000 trying to defeat him in 1986. The doctors' efforts went for naught, however, and despite all the money they spent, they only managed to drop the incumbent's winning margin by two percentage points.

Jacobs uses the same TV spots every election in order to keep expenses down, and on several occasions has refused any individual contributions because he had enough money left over from the previous election. Accepting no PAC money, he never mails contributions requests, nor does he send any unsolicited mailings to constituents. If you want to hear from this congressman, you have to ask to be put on his mailing list. He has won re-election by margins approaching 80 percent, yet his Indianapolis-based district, home of Dan Quayle, has more registered Republicans than Democrats.

It would seem that the Gentleman from Indiana has friends in even higher circles, as witness his refusal in 1974 to board a plane flying from Indianapolis to Washington because only first-class seats were available and he always travels coach. The plane crashed en route. killing all 92 on board.

Jacobs is much more popular with his constituents than he is among his fellow congressmen. For one thing, his ethics rules embarrass those with less strict standards. His refusal to accept a subcommittee chairmanship several years ago served to point up the unbridled ambition of many on Capitol Hill. The fact that he returns 41 percent of his salary is embarrassing to those who keep all of theirs and look around for other funding sources. His refusal to pay homage to PACs and lobbyists has given him an independence his contemporaries will never experience.

Andy Jacobs, your country will miss you, as proof that passage through shark-filled waters is still possible, even in ethically challenged 1996.

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