Kinder endorsement

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The races for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and treasurer feature strong candidates from both major parties, making decisions easy for party loyalists but difficult for independents.

In the lieutenant governor's race, the question is, "Will the real Peter Kinder please stand up?" Mr. Kinder, from Cape Girardeau, is a strong, principled conservative. As president pro tem of the Senate, he engineered the override of the governor's veto of the concealed guns and partial-birth abortion bills.

As he moved into a leadership position, Mr. Kinder also took pains to reach out to urban areas, backing state funding for the Cardinals' stadium and for historic preservation tax credits that have launched urban revitalization projects crucial to downtown St. Louis and other Missouri cities. Mr. Kinder was instrumental in letting die a profoundly bad bill to ban the promising research involving embryonic stem cells. That would have been a blow to efforts to make St. Louis a biotechnology hotbed. In short, Mr. Kinder is more a Chamber of Commerce Republican than an ideologue.

Mr. Kinder's leadership experience in the Senate is relevant to the lieutenant governor's constitutional role presiding over the Senate. His record on the other primary role of the office -- advocacy for the elderly -- is mixed. After having blocked nursing home reform early in his career, Mr. Kinder worked to pass a strong 2003 law. Mr. Kinder also sponsored a bill last year to use the state prescription drug money to plug the donut hole in the federal benefit.

The Democratic candidate, former Secretary of State Rebecca McDowell (Bekki) Cook, is far more aligned with most views of this page. She says that the most important state issue is "public education," adding that Mr. Kinder "consistently cut public education and pushed solutions from vouchers to charter schools." She is correct. Mr. Kinder did become personally involved in pushing a less than successful charter school project in St. Louis. And he presided over the Senate at a time of tight funding for public education. But education is not a constitutional duty of the lieutenant governor.

Ms. Cook also points to her record in favor of equal rights for women, including reproductive rights, in stark contrast to Mr. Kinder's strong anti-abortion stand. Ms. Cook was effective in reorganizing and running the secretary of state's office. She says her lack of experience in the state Senate actually is an advantage, pointing out that Mr. Kinder contributed to the nasty tone in the Senate.

If this were a race for governor, where the issues of education, women's rights and guns were in play, Ms. Cook would be our choice. But in light of Mr. Kinder's Senate experience, his role in helping seniors and his support for the economic interests of St. Louis (not always popular in his own district), the edge goes to Peter Kinder.