LONDON -- For a candidate on the brink of what may be a historic landslide, British Prime Minister Tony Blair seems strangely penitent these days. After four years in office, Blair approaches Thursday's election with a solid record of centrist accomplishment: more people working, fewer children in poverty; expanded preschool, reduced class sizes; greater help for the working poor, a new minimum wage. His center-left Labor Party has such an unshakable lead in the polls that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party's victory could produce an "elective dictatorship."

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For its closing argument, Labor is betting less on the progress than on a promise to do better next time; late last week it unveiled new posters and billboards that pledged a second Blair term would put "Schools and Hospitals First."

That supremely bread-and-butter message is reminiscent of Democrat Al Gore's promises to devote much of the U.S. budget surplus to education and health care. The similarity isn't too surprising since two top Gore strategists, Bob Shrum and Stan Greenberg, sit side-by-side in the Labor war room helping shape Blair's campaign.

Yet the convergence obscures a critical difference in strategy with important lessons for Democrats. Behind the common priority of greater social investment, Blair is pursuing a riskier, but ultimately more rewarding, balance between spending and reform -- an approach that more frankly acknowledges the skepticism about government's effectiveness that still clouds support for new programs on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Gore had some government reform ideas (particularly in education), he said little about them and placed much more emphasis on new spending. During the 2000 campaign, Gore offered nothing comparable to Bill Clinton's 1992 promise to "end welfare as we know it." At times Gore's message collapsed into little more than a pledge to pour more new money into old government programs than George W. Bush. That allowed Bush -- remarkably, given the Clinton administration's success in eliminating the federal deficit -- to effectively portray Gore as a throwback to big-government liberalism.

Blair -- having forced his party to the center under the same "third way" banner as Clinton -- is determined not to let the Conservative Party here do the same to him. After tightly controlling spending during his first two years in office, he's now promising big increases for health, education and transportation. But he unwaveringly ties those spending promises to demands for fundamental reform. "I've got no doubt at all after four years' experience of government that the changes and reforms of public services are every bit as important as the additional money," he said last week.

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It's tempting to see in Blair's coming victory the unruffled course Gore might have sailed without the scandal that swamped Clinton. But Blair's emphasis on reform, even at the cost of baiting his base, underscores Gore's contribution to his own defeat. Gore, a more conventional liberal than Clinton or Blair, surrendered the high road of reform and lost. Blair has indivisibly linked new money to new thinking and is heading toward a landslide that ought to cause congressional Democrats -- already replicating Gore's overemphasis on increased spending -- to take notice.

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