In the new issue of Blueprint magazine, Al From and Bruce Reed call George W. Bush a "leap year centrist" because his departures from a right-wing domestic agenda strictly coincide with election years. An important new report from the Progressive Policy Institute's Anne Kim and Will Marshall richly documents that pattern with respect to the president's claim to be a "compassionate conservative."

"Compassionate conservatism" was the Bush 2000 campaign theme that suggested the president had a plan to mobilize civic action to address the country's most pressing social problems, as an alternative to traditional public-sector programs. This was a big part of Bush's effort to pose as a "different kind of Republican." And he's brought the label back this year, as part of an audacious gambit to claim the political center while describing John Kerry as an old-fashioned, big-government liberal.

Consider this key passage in Bush's latest stump speech: "My opponent is a tax-and-spend liberal; I'm a compassionate conservative. My opponent wants to empower government; I want to use government to empower people." You can expect to hear similar lines in tonight's presidential debate.

Aside from the distortion of Kerry's record and agenda that this argument represents, it equally distorts the record and agenda of the president himself. That is made clear by PPI's Empty Promises: The Poverty of Compassionate Conservatism, the first truly systematic analysis of what the Bush administration has and has not done to implement the president's 2000 campaign promise to use public policy to rally "the armies of compassion." In this report, Kim and Marshall conclude that the whole enterprise has been designed to "solve his party's political problems rather than the nation's social problems."

While outlining six of the president's "broken promises" on his compassionate conservative agenda, Kim and Marshall focus on two as especially significant: (1) his failure, at a time when the administration was railroading trillions of dollars in tax cuts through Congress, to push a proposal for a charitable contribution deduction for non-itemizers, which the president himself suggested could generate $80 billion in new private giving; and (2) his refusal to take advantage of Senate Democratic support for a "charitable choice" initiative to help give faith-based organizations greater access to government grants, letting his own legislation die in a partisan cross fire.

Kim and Marshall also chronicle the unwillingness of the administration to push its congressional allies on funding for a "compassion capital fund" to spread charitable best practices; its disinterest in securing congressional support for a major substance abuse treatment program; its complete abandonment of the president's central 2002 State of the Union Address proposal for a major expansion of national service opportunities; and its failure to move towards reauthorization of the landmark 1996 welfare reform law because it didn't want to match tougher work requirements with the childcare funding necessary to make them feasible.

What's most striking about the disconnect between the president's rhetoric and record on "compassionate conservatism" is his claim, first made in 2000 and now on display again, that this is not simply a policy initiative, but the core of his whole governing philosophy. As Kim and Marshall conclude: "Rather than a paradigmatic shift in domestic social policy, what has emerged is a grab bag of small-scale, underfunded efforts that do little more than tinker at the margins of existing social policy."

As clergy often say during annual drives for more giving by the faithful: "Your heart is where you place your treasure." For four years, George W. Bush has relentlessly promoted bounty for the wealthiest American, despite terrorist attacks, two wars, recession and a sluggish recovery, huge budget deficits, an impending fiscal disaster associated with the retirement of the baby boom generation, and a variety of major unmet national challenges. "Compassionate conservatism" has been at the very end of a very long line of supplicants for Bush's favor. He should have the decency -- and the compassion -- to stop pretending otherwise.

Blueprint Keywords: Extra Compassion