Back in 2000, the centerpiece of the GOP pitch to the moderate majority of Americans was the idea that then-Governor George W. Bush was a "different kind of Republican" who had replaced heartless and divisive Gingrichism with something called "compassionate conservatism." It was a pretty dubious proposition even then, as we pointed out in an analysis of the Bush domestic agenda entitled "The Great Pretender."

Last night's Republican Convention session was intended to dust off compassionate conservatism and wheel it out one more time before it's permanently consigned to the political museum of empty rhetoric. But there's a problem this time around: Mr. Bush has a record to defend, his own and that of a Congress controlled by his party.

Four years ago in Philadelphia, Bush complained that the prosperity of the 1990s had left too many poor people behind, even though the number of Americans living in poverty had dropped dramatically. In the first three years of the Bush presidency, poverty rates have steadily gone up. The real income gains of the 1990s among low-income families have been reversed. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to rise. Low-income families aren't being left behind the middle class, but that's because middle-class families are struggling to get along as well.

Bush's own "compassionate conservative" agenda has proved to be even emptier than it looked in 2000. His "faith-based organizations" initiative, trumpeted as a way to attack social problems without the bureaucracy of public programs, continues to languish in the GOP-run Congress, the victim of administration indifference. Despite the passage of well over a trillion dollars in tax cuts, Bush's proposal to provide $80 billion in tax cuts to promote charitable giving has gone nowhere.

The centerpiece of the president's 2002 State of the Union Address was a pledge to significantly expand national and community service opportunities, as an important way to mobilize what the president once called "the armies of compassion." Then Bush stood by and watched his friends in Congress come within a whisker of shutting down the AmeriCorps program. And the White House did nothing to secure funding for a mentorship initiative for children of prisoners, an idea Mr. Bush has been touting for years. Nor has the administration or Congress moved off the dime in reauthorizing the 1996 welfare reform law, mainly because Republicans refuse to figure out a way to come up with the money for child care that could make tougher work requirements feasible.

Indeed, that same profligate federal government has refused to provide the resources or the direction necessary to implement the president's one truly valuable domestic initiative, the No Child Left Behind education reform plan, largely borrowed from New Democrats. Yet Republicans are calling John Kerry a flip-flopper for insisting that Mr. Bush keep his end of the bargain by providing cash for school districts under a federal mandate to improve student performance.

It was richly ironic to watch California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger serve as the central figure in last night's compassion play. If there's one thing The Terminator has consistently supported in public life, it's the importance of after-school opportunities for at-risk kids. Indeed, he visited an after-school program in New York this morning. Yet the administration has sought repeatedly to slash federal funding for these same programs on grounds that they are unaffordable, at a time when the federal government is running up the largest budget deficits in U.S. history.

And even more strikingly, in a speech largely devoted to the immigrant experience in America, Schwarzenegger did not dare mention the president's own proposal for reform of U.S. immigration laws, which is intensely disliked by many of the conservative activists who were waving "Arnold" signs on the Convention floor.

All in all, Compassion Night was a much larger affront to objective reality than its predecessor, the Monday session devoted to portraying the president as a Churchillian figure who alone is willing to fight terrorism.

Mr. Bush's defenders will undoubtedly claim that his poor record on his own "compassion" agenda is just another casualty of 9/11 and a sluggish economy. But it's precisely when budgets are tight and choices have to be made that we see what political leaders really care about. On the domestic front, this president cares about shifting the tax burden from wealth to work, and from the wealthy to the middle class, and he won't let war, recession, or budgetary arithmetic -- much less compassion -- stand in the way.