A View from Metro East                                      

Here in the second largest concentration of population in the state, the dynamics of political coverage are even more complicated than that basic distinction between all gore and Al Gore

By PATRICK E. GAUEN

Not one to hide his displeasures, George Ryan scowled as he glided into the nearly empty lobby of St. Louis Downtown-Parks Airport in Cahokia.

From outside, naked eyes could see the tall buildings containing two major TV stations right over there on the St. Louis skyline.

And he was, after all, the incumbent locked in a fierce and ugly secretary of state's race with another high official — both of them clearly harboring aspirations of one day being the governor of Illinois.

But there was not a single camera set up for Ryan's press conference.

In fact, media-wise there was just me, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who knows Ryan well enough not to take offense when he gruffly approached to ask, "Is there anybody here?"

"Anybody," of course, is really political flyaround parlance for TV crews, whose magic access to free airtime is the principal reason such candidates leave Chicagoland at all.

Even in Chicago, the strategists tell me, it is increasingly difficult to draw news coverage without bullets and bleeding.

Here in what we call Metro East, the second largest concentration of population in the state, the dynamics of political coverage are even more complicated than that basic distinction between all gore and Al Gore.

In an age when virtually every politician worships on the altar of television, this is a tough place to crack.

For one thing, all five of our region's TV news operations are based in St. Louis, with what seems to be waning interest in things east of the Mississippi River.

It used to be that you could count on most of these stations to cover an itinerant Ryan on the stump. Now you can't be positive that any of them will show up for even the likes of Gov. Jim Edgar or challenger Dawn Clark Netsch.

For another thing, Illinois candidates face the same problem here that northwestern Indiana candidates face in metro Chicago. The airtime rates are big-league and the majority of their money is wasted — in our case about three dollars out of every four squandered on Missouri viewers who don't care and don't matter.

About three airtime dollars out of every four are squandered on Missouri viewers who don't care

So candidates direct their bucks toward a bigger bang, not exactly ignoring St. Louis TV but neither giving Metro East the paid media deluge that blasts from the Chicago broadcast nozzles.

And I've noticed, subtly so far, that the top candidates just don't visit here quite so much anymore. The formerly obligatory stop at Cahokia — or at the airport in Bethalto — may be skipped in favor of smaller Illinois markets with hungrier cameras.

(I hope I'm bursting no bubbles for the politically naive, but it's long been fact that most of the traditional, folksy, door-to-door campaigning is relegated to candidates who aren't important enough — or rich enough — to draw airtime on TV, and maybe radio. Major campaign rallies are calculated to attract cameras first, and secondarily to gather enough people to make the pictures impressive.)

Maybe I should take heart in all of this, for it suggests that the candidates are a touch more at the mercy of print reporting hereabouts. But as an Illinois voter, I am leery that my neighbors are growing further out of touch with the people they vote for.

Seldom are the major candidates from

42/February 1995/Illinois Issues

among my neighbors.

Despite our size, we haven't had a local in constitutional office since Dave O'Neal quit as lieutenant governor in 1981. (James Donnewald, state treasurer 1983-87, was from our periphery.) U.S. Sen. Alan Dixon was defeated almost three years ago.

Metro East has always tended to be taken for granted by Democrats, and with little wonder since St. Clair County has not a single Republican in countywide office, and Madison has just one.

But this is a territory that sometimes fires up for GOP statewide candidates and did skew its votes noticeably to the right along with the national Republican tide in November.

Witness: Jim Edgar got just 42 percent of the two counties' votes for governor in 1990, but he got 62.9 percent of them in 1994.

Mayor Gordon D. Bush of East St. Louis, whose city has always been a reliable source of rock for Democratic landslides, even stumped for Edgar's re-election.

I am leery that my neighbors are growing further out of touch with the people they vote for

John Shimkus, a Republican, got elected treasurer of Madison County in 1990 because the Democratic incumbent took a personal stumble. It can happen. But the voters liked Shimkus well enough to re-elect him in 1994. And that, for a Republican, is without modem precedent.

Residential growth seems to be in the yuppie spectrum. The belts are slipping on the Democratic machines.

Small cracks in the cement? Sure.

Meaningless? Not so sure.

Politics is not the widespread pastime down here as in Chicago. For the state's top offices, the electoral mindset here is fairly open and pliable.

Even if this package is a bit hard to open, its contents would seem worthwhile. There are almost 300,000 registered voters hiding inside. *

Patrick E. Gauen covers Illinois politics for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.