Big election year ahead

Will the November 2004 election, now 14 months off, be the most consequential since at least 1980, or perhaps even 1964?

Yes, says conservative publisher Bill Kristol, writing in the current edition of his magazine, The Weekly Standard. Kristol addresses the national scene from his perch in the Beltway and on Fox News.

This writer is inclined to agree and to add that Kristol is dead on, in spades, as it relates to Show Me State issues being fought out across this great state over the next year and more.

We are at a historic juncture in Missouri politics and state government.

For 130 years, Missouri politics was defined along fault lines that developed during the cataclysm of the Civil War, a catastrophe so wrenching and far-reaching that we softies today can scarcely imagine it.

"You vote how your great-great-granddaddy fought," said the authoritative Michael "Almanac of American Politics" Barone to this writer in casual conversation a couple of years ago. The practical meaning of this is that across much of rural and small-town Missouri -- north and south -- those sections that were slave-holding and Confederate-sympathizing during that awful civil conflict still voted staunchly Democratic nearly 13 decades after Appomattox. And what Republican strength there was in Missouri was confined mostly to two enclaves in a largely Democratic state:

1. The nonslaveholding hill and dairy farms of Southwest Missouri, whose immigrant patterns were from the upland counties of Eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee -- both Union-symapthizing regions.

2. Rapidly suburbanizing St. Louis County, for 30 years a fairly reliable Republican stronghold, a GOP bastion eroded over the last decade by the continuing depopulation of the city of St. Louis, as Democrats today flee a city that others began fleeing in 1946.

The Civil War appears to have begun ending in the Show Me State about a decade ago.

This writer's 1992 pickup of a Democratic Senate seat was, in the words of one writer, "the first crack in the previously solid Democratic stranglehold on most of outstate Missouri."

That fissure has widened over the last decade, yielding slow but steady GOP gains that culminated in the historic capture of both houses of the legislature last November by solid Republican majorities of 20-14 (Senate) and 90-63 (House).

These legislative majorities confront a Democratic governor for whom public enthusiasm has been well contained. Gov. Bob Holden is about to join Joe Teasdale (1977-81) as a governor with a dubious distinction: a strong challenge to his effort to win renomination within his own party.

Teasdale solidly won renomination, only to fall in November to a resurgent Kit Bond in the latter's 1980 grudge match, settling his score from four years before.

Back to my beginning point -- the stakes in the 2004 election: In Missouri next year, it will pretty much be all on the line.

Abortion on demand, plus taxpayer funding of same?

Holden says yes, as he confronts a united GOP that is a pro-life party in a solidly pro-life state.

Forced unionization of state government, and the return of the lug on state workers' paychecks?

Holden did it by executive order to united GOP opposition.

The Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners?

Holden vetoed the bill under a version of which the vast majority of Americans live.

And on, and on:

Taxes -- as in Holden's support for sharply higher ones.

Lawsuit reform.

Workers compensation reform.

Small-business regulatory relief.

These and more will be teed up beginning Sept. 10 at noon, as we convene to make history by overriding as many of these vetoes as we can.

With 163 members of the House up for election and half the Senate, plus five of the six statewide offices, Missouri voters are about to be offered stark choices in the most consequential election in decades.

Bring it on.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.