St. Louis mayor blasts Democrat candidates

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay is taking a pair of fellow Democrats to task for criticizing their Republican opponents' support of state funding for a new Cardinals baseball stadium.

The criticism surfaces in a television ad run by the campaigns of Robin Carnahan, who is running for secretary of state, and Bekki Cook, a candidate for lieutenant governor. The ad began running late last week across the state, but not in the St. Louis market, campaign officials said.

"In my view, they have crossed the line with this ad," Slay said Monday. "This is St. Louis bashing, pure and simple, and I don't like it. ... Basically what they're doing is bashing St. Louis in order to advance their own political agenda. It's playing on people's worst instincts."

When asked if he still supports Cook and Carnahan in their races, Slay said he had in the past but, "I want to see where this goes."

The 30-second ad is the latest to play off the long-standing distrust, and even resentment, of St. Louis by some living in other parts of the state.

However, Tony Wyche, a spokesman for the Carnahan campaign disputed that characterization of the ad, saying it was about priorities, not bashing St. Louis. Republican House Speaker Catherine Hanaway and Carnahan's opponent, and Republican Peter Kinder, the Senate leader facing Cook, should not have supported the stadium measure when schools could have used that money, Wyche said.

The bill, which ultimately failed, would have authorized the state to spend $644 million over three decades, with the biggest chunk benefiting the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. Some of that money also would have gone to the Savvis Center in St. Louis and developments in Branson and Springfield.

The ad refers only to the Cardinals stadium and notes that both Kinder and Hanaway have received contributions from Cardinals owners.

Hanaway represents a suburban St. Louis district, while Kinder is from Cape Girardeau, as is Cook. Carnahan grew up in Rolla, but now lives in St. Louis.

Chuck Caisley, a Hanaway spokesman, called the ad misleading and negative.

"It's divisive. They're pitting the rest of the state against St. Louis," he said.

The spot also says Kinder and Hanaway supported cuts in education spending. "Stadiums instead of schools. Now, Kinder and Hanaway are running for higher office," the ad states. "After what they did with your tax dollars, do they deserve your vote?"

In fact, the education vote was the following year, and the final education budget was roughly equal to what public schools had received the previous year, after an influx of federal money.

Wyche, however, said it has been Republicans who "for years" have tried to divide the state by "criticizing St. louis and Kansas City as if they're foreign countries."

"The claims of Catherine Hanaway and Peter Kinder that this ad is an attempt to bash St. Louis are merely an effort to divert attention from the simple fact that they decided that 200 million taxpayer dollars were better spent funding new stadiums than on schools," Wyche said.

In the August election, the geographic rivalry came into play when Kansas City voters were asked to approve tax increases on hotel rooms and rental cars to fund a new arena in the city's downtown. The opposing campaign was funded almost exclusively by St. Louis-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and supporters used Enterprise's hometown to discredit their position.

Terry Jones, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said the idea of pitting urban against rural interests in Missouri is nothing new.

"That's clearly the intent of the ad, to have Hanaway and Kinder side with a St. Louis interest," Jones said. "Similarly, Senator Kinder and Representative Hanaway, when they took those positions, were seeking to show they were sympathetic to urban interests."

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On the Net:

Cook: http://www.bekkicook.com

Kinder: http://www.peterkinder.net

Carnahan: http://www.robincarnahan.com

Hanaway: http://www.hanaway.org