Kansas City Strip

Chew on this: Emanuel Cleaver tells us that recent polls show the former mayor would do pretty well if he were to run for the position again. But that doesn't mean he's thinking about a return to City Hall.

"Absolutely not," he says. "I can't think of any circumstance in which I would run for mayor."

So why the polling? "Somebody else had done the polling," Cleaver explains.

Could that have been former U.S. Representative Alan Wheat, who's just moved home from Washington? "He's not gonna run," Cleaver insists. "He realizes that his numbers look good, but for him, running would be a tremendous sacrifice."

"I didn't move to Kansas City for political reasons," Wheat tells us.

Besides, some other numbers aren't so great. Mayor Kay Barnesmakes $86,528 a year -- which might not support Wheat in the lifestyle he's become accustomed to since becoming a lobbyist, a career he'll continue from Kansas City.

Worse, Wheat would face questions about his work on behalf of lead-paint manufacturers. "The companies acted responsibly in working to take lead paint for interior use off the market more than forty years ago," Wheat wrote in a July 20, 2000, editorial for The Milwaukee Times.

The ads could be fierce: A sad-looking toddler with paint chips on her lips stares dully into the TV camera. "Alan Wheat says he caresabout Kansas City's children," bellows the voice-over. "But he's spent yearsin Washington, D.C., protecting lead-paintmanufacturers from poisoned children. And now he wants to be our mayor?" A simple majority: Within a week after Independence earned honors as the fourth-whitest town in America, George W. Bush paid a visit. He's spending his vacation in battleground states, putting on an early and cute act of pretending that voters count.

Why'd it take so long for Bush to visit Harry S. Truman's hometown? Like Bush, the old Missourian had a penchant for making friends blush when he spoke. Like Bush, Truman assumed office without being elected -- although Truman's ascension was due to Franklin Roosevelt's death, not the Supreme Court's fraudulent mischief. All Bush has to do is drop a nuke, and he'll forever be remembered as Trumanesque.