HILADELPHIA - It's not even Election Day, and already Governor George W. Bush is a role model.
Not for young children yet, nor for striving adults. But Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, perhaps the leading Gingrich-brand conservative in the Senate, has taken the Bush example to heart. He's taken the sharp edges off his rhetoric. He has cooled his political ardor. He's for compassionate conservatism now.
Only a year ago, Republican strategists considered Santorum, 42, an endangered species. Democrats had him in their sights. Commentators thought he was a dead duck. No more. Santorum has 13 times as much money in his treasury as his opponent, US Representative Ron Klink, and a comfortable lead in public opinion polls. He's a different man, in a different position. Just how different, and how he got that way, is a tale of the times.
How contagious is Bush's brand?
This tale gets to the heart of an important question in Pennsylvania politics: Does the Keystone State really want a senator who really believes in conservatism? Since the 1950s, Pennsylvania has embraced a special brand of moderate Republicans, from Governors William Scranton and Tom Ridge to Senators Hugh Scott, Richard Schweiker, Arlen Specter, and John Heinz. Santorum is the most conservative figure elected to statewide office in Pennsylvania in a half century.
The Santorum story also raises a question about national politics: How contagious is the Bush form of Republicanism, full of velvet phrases and velvet fists? Right now, even the hardest-skinned conservatives are breaking out with symptoms of compassionate conservatism.
''Santorum is still prolife, still progun,'' said G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Millersville University and director of the Keystone Poll. ''But you can notice in the last year he's beginning to think about funding things in inner cities and for African-Americans. He's for bridge repairs and fixing up roads. He's for spending a good deal of the surplus. He has tacked to the center. This is a softer, milder Rick Santorum.''
This kinder, gentler profile has only added to the frustration of Klink, a onetime television journalist who thought he was challenging a highly vulnerable extremist. Klink, 48, still is not known by three out of five voters.
''Santorum's votes still continue to be as conservative as ever,'' said Klink, who represents Beaver County in western Pennsylvania, not far from Santorum's own political base of Pittsburgh. ''It's the rhetoric that has changed. No one has been fooled by this. The political reality is that this guy has a 10-year record, and the voters of this state are not stupid. They know Rick Santorum.''
Maybe. But a lot of the very Republicans who were most skeptical of Santorum's prospects now are believers, even if they do not fully believe Santorum's conversion.
''He's been running a very smart campaign,'' says Elsie Hillman, an honorary chairwoman of the Bush campaign and a legendary force in Pennsylvania politics. ''He's matured. He's not so rigid, and that's helped. Pennsylvania really isn't comfortable with anyone too far to any one side. He was too far out there, and it began to show. He's decided to really represent the people of Pennsylvania.''
Trying to avoid an asterisk
He has also decided not to be known as an asterisk in history, an accidental senator swept into power in the conservative revolution of 1994 that gave the Republicans control of the Congress for the first time in four decades and propelled Gingrich to the House speakership. Heinz's widow, Teresa Heinz, now the wife of Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, once called Santorum part of a new, distasteful breed of politicians who ''mock, belittle, and vilify those who disagree with them.''
Santorum recognizes that, as he puts it, ''I was considered a radical zealot nut,'' especially on the subject of welfare. The country has moved toward Santorum's position on welfare, but he has moved toward the rest of the country on other issues.
His idiom is different, too. Consider this from a conversation with him here the other day: ''Republicans always argued that all we need is a good economy, and everything will be OK. But we've had pretty much the best economy you can have, and everything is not OK. You take the far-left ideas and the far-right ideas, and you see neither is right.''
That's the essence of the Bush message to the Republican Party, a marriage of the Republican head and the Democratic heart.
''I have known Rick Santorum since he was a kid,'' said Robert C. Jubelirer, the leader of the Pennsylvania Senate. ''He wasn't always so mature. He's grown a great deal. And his timing is impeccable.''
That sounds like Bush. The Texas governor has only been the nominee for a month, but already he is a type - and a trend.
