Two years ago this winter, in a campaign mode for his re-election effort, President Bill Clinton told Americans, "The era of Big Government is over." You wouldn't know it by his budget. Of that proposed document, House Budget Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, says, "It looks like the president wants to eliminate state and local government and run everything out of Washington."

Gov. Mel Carnahan, joined by House and Senate Democrats, are following Clinton, indeed in some ways outdoing him in Jefferson City. Big Government is back with a vengence. Consider two of the Democrats' major bills this year. One seeks the largest expansion of Medicaid ever. Gov. Carnahan's bill, sponsored by Senate Majority Floor Leader Ed Quick, D-Kansas City, would expand Medicaid coverage to families with incomes of 300 percent of poverty. Thus Missouri families of four with incomes of $48,000 and families of three with incomes of $39,000 would be eligible for Medicaid. Thus are the seeds sown for a huge expansion of government, a huge new cohort of middle-class citizens who will be taught the habits of dependency.

All this, we are told, is in the name of "children," and for this reason can't be opposed without dire consequences. You know: Vote against it and Democrats and liberal editorial writers will say you're "against children."

Are opposing Republicans heartless concerning the health-care needs of uninsured children? Hardly. This writer introduced a promising alternative bill, seeking to accomplish the same goal in a more cost-effective manner. We had the hearing on my bill last week, and among those represented before the committee were representatives of Missouri's three great children's hospitals: Children's Mercy in Kansas City, joined by Cardinal Glennon and St. Louis Children's from the eastern side of the state.

In floor debate this week on Quick's bill, the issue got very partisan. We Republicans fought valiantly, losing on a series of party-line votes in our attempts to modify the bill. We'll doggedly continue the effort this coming week, with about the same chance of success. My bill, though backed by this impressive cohort of experts, enjoys no chance.

Now it's on to the next Democratic bill: Putting the public schools into the day-care business. That's my blunt characterization for what this governor, trapped in the insufferably pompous jargon of the educrats, calls "early childhood education." We're talking pre-kindergarten schooling for 3- and 4-year-olds here, folks. In the public schools.

I have written in this space before that these folks, certain that they know far better than mere parents, are literally coming for your children. This move now accelerates.

Sadly, the leading education organizations of teachers and administrators are silent. I have been going to meetings of these folks for six years now, and you can't ever show up without hearing the same refrain: We're dumping too much on the public schools, asking these good people to accomplish far too much. I heartily agree. Where are these educators, now that the folks who are turning the public schools into all-purpose health-care delivery centers, through expanding Medicaid, are also putting them into the day care business?

November will be interesting -- interesting, that is, to see whether the voters who in 1994 sent such an unmistakable message of smaller government and lower taxes will bestir themselves for the crucial election campaigns that will, this fall, decide control of a Missouri General Assembly in Democratic hands for nearly 50 years.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.