VOTING IN MISSOURI: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES, PERVERSITIES

KENNETT, Mo. -- Probably no human activity in this modern age offers more surprises, quirks and twists than politics.

For proof of this unscientific declaration, one need only gaze upon our own state and its large cast of players, political junkies and partisan Pharisees.

There was a time in Missouri's political history when an essential component of politics involved economics or, to put it less grandly, the pursuit of a payroll in order to feed one's family.

In the late 1920s and especially during much of the 1930s, many candidates for even the highest offices were motivated by the salaries they would receive to provide sustenance for their families. I recall one such candidate, a victim of the Depression, borrowing money from a wealthier neighbor to file for a statewide office. Many candidates back then were motivated to seek county, even congressional offices, for the sole purpose of feeding their families.

Time, bank accounts and economic recovery have a way of changing things. Today, if there is money exchanged between politician and public, its destination is media advertising, campaign staffs and advisers and saturation mailings. Money is still important but its use is vastly different.

I'll leave it to you to decide if there's been any progress in this dark corner of representative democracy.

As Missourians we saw numerous changes, quirks and twists in the last campaign of the old millennium, including the tragic deaths of our governor seeking to occupy a U.S. Senate seat, his son and his aide in a plane crash less than a month before the Nov. 7 election. Even Missourians with a bare sense of history immediately recalled another plane crash occurring on an election night 24 years earlier in which the victim, Congressman Jerry Litton, had just wont he Democratic nomination for another Senate seat.

Two nominees, both Democrats, both seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate, both killed in small-plane mishaps, both leading in the polls. Only Massachusetts witnessed such political tragedies in the last century.

Yet another Missourian, whose political history is still being written, is a former state auditor, attorney general, governor and, at the moment, a defeated U.S. senator. Just when it seemed John Ashcroft would have to wait at least two more years before re-entering politics, a politically challenged presidential presumptive, the son of a former president, named him as the nation's next attorney general.

The appointment followed a string of disappointments for the Southwest Missouri Republican, who only a couple of years ago was preparing to seek the same job now held by his most recent benefactor. His consolation is that, upon confirmation, he will become America's chief legal officer with powers much greater than any he ever possessed on Capitol Hill.

Let's trace the irony a bit further. The designated president who selected the defeated Senate candidate as his attorney general was assured the office by a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision, and one of the five votes making up the plurality is a former Missourian who once served in the office of Missouri attorney general, then occupied by a political ally of the defeated senator. Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas was appointed to his lifetime-tenured court job by the father of the designated president, adding a bit of Texas to the political history of Missouri.

Political quirkiness isn't confined to political personalities. In the general election held two months ago, more Missourians voted against an insignificant alteration in the state's bingo laws than cast ballots for either of the major presidential candidates. Indeed, the bingo total came within only a few hundred votes behind both Gore or Bush combined. The candidate receiving the most votes Nov. 7 was the seventh listed on the statewide ticket: Attorney General Jay Nixon, the only candidate from either party to get above 60 percent victory margin.

George W. Bush defeated his Democratic opponent in Missouri voting by 78,000 votes, thereby preserving the state's bellwether status, but perhaps more significant is the fact that more than 1.5 million of us who were registered didn't go to the polls to vote or putting it yet another way: More than one out of every three registered citizens of Missouri didn't show up at the polls in November.

Missourians also decided they like the current campaign system, with few restraints on excessive spending and want nothing changed, much less reformed, and they also seem to like their highways dotted with unlimited billboards, judging from their 60.9 percent opposition for reform.

Nor do they want to pay their public servants a dime more than they're currently paid. These electoral views seem to run contrary to other expressions of the public which include criticisms of politicians chasing campaign money from questionable, even bizarre sources, the loss of experienced and competent public servants to the private sector and one of the nation's highest proliferation of billboards along public highways.

When he came home to Missouri after his stint in the Oval Office, Harry Truman received more than 70,000 letters, which he noted were all favorable except for a hundred "and those few, of course, were from friends." Perhaps these observations on the perversity of Missouri campaigns and elections can best be summed up by Franklin Roosevelt's observation that "if you want a friend in politics, get a dog."

My favorite political line comes from Huey Long, who expressed his desire to be buried in Louisiana so he could still take part in elections. Maybe the Kingfish was really a native of Florida.

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