NO AGING AGENCY

Democrats in the Missouri General Assembly, egged on by Gov. Mel Carnahan and Lt. Gov. Roger Wilson, have passed and sent to voters a proposed constitutional amendment to create a Department of Aging in state government. The current Division of Aging within the Department of Social Services, it seems, isn't good enough. This episode says a lot about how a phony issue gets manufactured in an election year.

Democrats have controlled the General Assembly for decades. For the last four years, add to their domination of state government the executive branch. In all this time they had never before grasped the absolute urgency of this expansion of government. Along comes an election year in which President Clinton's strategy is to scare elderly voters about alleged Medicare "cuts" that don't exist, and it becomes easy to see the strategy. Whip up a lot of concern among the elderly at the state level, the better to dovetail into the national Clinton strategy. Anyone who votes against this expansion of government, the claim goes, is "against" old folks. Or at the very least, that person can be alleged to be "insensitive" to their plight.

Few ploys were ever more cynical. Proponents are laughing up their sleeves, congratulating themselves for their cleverness. Left unsaid among all this game-playing is what, exactly, a cabinet-level department in state government will do for any senior citizen. "They'll have a seat at the table," we're told. "Seniors' concerns won't go unheard." These refrains, which are apparently the best proponents can do, are certainly weak reeds on which to lean a permanent expansion of state government.

Hollow as these claims are, they also beg another question. Wilson, the lieutenant governor, has bragged about being an ombudsman and advocate for seniors. So, a question: Is he at the table and making their case or isn't he?

Moreover, this move may actually hurt delivery of services to seniors. Expanding the domain of Jefferson City bureaucrats will almost certainly cut into resources available for delivery at the grass-roots level where the need is both real and acute.

Today's Democratic Party is led by a president whose face remained straight as he declared, in this year's State of the Union speech, that "the era of big government is over." Not for Missouri Democrats, it isn't.