SEPARATING CAMPAIGNS FROM GOVERNING IS LIKE SEPARATING CHAFF FROM WHEAT

Both Missouri and the nation as a whole are momentarily engaged in the process of selecting candidates for important, critical public-service offices, and while the winners and losers across the country and in our own state are fairly recognizable, many continue to labor under the impression that when they elections are at least over, the course of our state and national governments will be charted and a multitude of changes which we either favor or oppose will begin occurring.

This view that campaigns and governing are closely and intrinsically connected, and that our choices at the polls will produce satisfactory, even dramatic, alterations in our self-government system is one of the principal reasons many have become increasingly disenchanted with the present system.

There are a number of reasons we have accepted the premise that candidates for public office, once elected, will inaugurate and then pursue the policies they have espoused on the campaign trail. One of the principle reasons for our belief can be traced to the candidates themselves, who repeatedly assure us that their election will inaugurate the reforms so obviously needed in our society.

While the issues in Missouri's selection of a new governor later this year are less defined than the arguments being advanced by presidential candidates, we still have at least a glimpse of what we can expect from Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Bob Holden even before any differences are defined and one is sworn in as our next chief executive. Holden will attempt to expand on the policies of his predecessor, while adding some original touches of his own, while Talent will attempt to correlate his statehouse program agenda with those he evaluated while a member of Congress.

The policies of neither candidate will prevail if economic circumstances in the first months of their tenure change dramatically thereby making improvement of the status quo virtually impossible. A major recession, citing only one example, dramatically altered the course of the Ashcroft administration forcing the state's last GOP chief executive to take advantage of every welfare-state program offered by Washington, after the candidate vigorously lashed out against the devastating evils of "federal government interference" and "reckless Washington spending."

The point is that Ashcroft, a capable and effective administrator, was forced to meet unexpected contingencies never dreamed of by any electorate that had chosen him on the basis of far different standards than the ones required to meet emergency situations in a depressed economy. Ashcroft governed as best he could, with little time left to regard the luxury of ideological advancement.

Ashcroft's successor, Mel Carnahan, had been in office only a brief time when a stopgap measure to fund both Missouri's foundation payments to local schools and finance the multibillion-dollar desegregation payments to St. Louis and Kansas City schools was ruled unconstitutional. Regardless of what the candidate had said would be his defining philosophy during the campaign, the actual circumstances encountered in his incumbency required a different course, with virtually no perceptible or acceptable leeway for compromise.

Regardless of what voters are told during a campaign a posturing almost demanded by all candidates' normal constituencies the ideological promises must give way to realities encountered once the responsibility for governing is under way. Bill Bradley can outline the most minute details of his proposed national health care plan while on the campaign trail but cannot escape the realities of securing its approval and its adequate funding from a skeptical congressional branch. George W. Bush can pledge to reduce taxes but his promise means nothing without the separation-of-power safeguards that have been with us since the Constitution of 1787. The same can be said of John McCain's platform plank on campaign reform or Al Gore's promises to improve the lot of low-income families.

A promise is a promise to circumvent promises that cannot (nor quite possibly ever could) be fulfilled.

Before it can get under way, the Ashcroft-Carnahan campaign promises, despite pledges to the contrary, to be one of the bittersweet contests in Missouri history. The reason for this is not hard to come by: both men have a great amount of animus for each other, a condition that will change the focus of the campaign more than their actual political differences, meaning Missourians will spend the next eight months listening to insults barely hovering above the slander line.

Regardless of the tone struck during any campaign, the issues become less and less relevant the closer the election date nears; by the time actual voting occurs, mot times the constituents become not much more than mere spectators of severe personality conflicts. This wasn't the concept invented by our founding fathers but it has more and more become our political cataclysm as our ways of communication have grown exponentially and our society has become not only much larger but virtually twice again as complex. It is quite possible, metaphorically speaking, in today's media to accuse an opponent not only of beating his wife but to display her injuries for all to see.

None of this has anything to do with filling vital public offices with men whose capabilities will provide the innovative leadership needed at the moment. The public may not realize this on a conscious level, but even those caught up in the firestorm of execrable verbiage will realize it on some level, leading not only to their indifference to our vital electoral system but an actual dislike for a process Thomas Jefferson saw as "an opportunity to unite our nation as one."

Today's campaigns fail Jefferson's vision by a mile.

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