KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WITH PALS LIKE MEL AND BOB, WHO NEEDS FOES?

Missouri won the Kansas City school desegregation case by a knockout in the U.S. Supreme Court. Gov. Mel Carnahan and Education Commissioner Bob Bartman, seated at ringside, have thrown in our towel. Thanks a lot, guys.

Missourians can't say we weren't warned. In 1992, candidate Mel Carnahan traversed the state arguing that Missouri needed to quit litigating the most expensive desegregation case in America. Seeming to take a page from singer Michael Jackson's book ("I'm a lover, not a fighter") Mel Carnahan argued that we should negotiate, not pursue a legal remedy.

Having won in November 1992 largely due to the troubles of a scandal-plagued opponent, Mel Carnahan moved into the mansion, and Missouri began to see what negotiations, Carnahan-style, would mean for our pocketbook. Payments by the hundreds of millions of dollars continued flowing to Kansas City, pleasing Carnahan political cronies determined to continue sticking up Missouri taxpayers and shortchanging the rest of our schools. Price tag to date: over $1.6 billion for gold-plated Kansas City schools.

U.S. District Judge Russell Clark, a Jimmy Carter appointee of the stripe we can expect from today's Democratic Party, had been at work for years now, remaking the schools of MIssouri's second largest city. Judge Clark's plan was to make the Kansas City schools so incredibly attractive to suburban parents that they would come rushing back to enroll their kids in the city. They didn't.

Surveys have shown what anyone with plain, old, ordinary horse sense would never have doubted: These parents would put their children almost anywhere but in the wonderful schools of Russell Clark's fevered imagination.

Mel Carnahan appointed as his negotiator a liberal St. Louis University law professor and a twice-failed candidate for attorney general named Mike Wolff. In his campaigns for attorney general, Professor Wolff won the editorial endorsement of the liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which praised him for what they called his "enlightened approach to desegregation."

We know what those words meant. Those words meant that we were going to continue to spend and spend and spend. The unfolding situation was not unlike Coach George Allen, hired 25 years ago to guide the Washington Redskins. Owner Jack Kent Cooke quipped, "I gave him an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it."

So with Mike Wolff, Mel Carnahan and Bob Bartman at the negotiating table, the stage was set for the incredible events of the last month. On June 12, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Missouri's favor, declaring Judge Clark's wasteful spending to be unlawful. Specifically the court ruled that the state needn't make any more of the payments for salaries of Kansas City school personnel that we had been making. It was a tremendous victory for the state of the kind we had been hoping for for years. Eighteen days later, in what may well have been an illegal act, Mel Carnahan personally approved the payment of $5.4 million for this very purpose.

As Sen. Steve Ehlmann, R-St. Charles, stated the matter: "This $5.4 million should be on the negotiating table. Instead, it's in their (Kansas City schools) pocket." Elhmann asked Dr. Bartman: "Whose side are you on?"

I have forgotten which sage it was who observed, "Many more such victories, and we will be undone." Who among us believes the hard-pressed schools across our state, to say nothing of the taxpayers Mel Carnahan has overburdened, can afford any more of the negotiating tax team of Carnahan, Wolff and Bartman?

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.