CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. -- One of the major causes of the conservative movement in the last decade is retreating meekly to the shadows under the pressures of a national election year. Most conservatives won't talk about using public school money for private schools, a few hint at it, but hardly any use words like vouchers and choice. Instead, in the all-important image department, they compete with their more progressive opponents for the critical distinction of being viewed as not only pro-public education but willing to invest new money in it.
Usually, this requires entertaining efforts at reinvention and obfuscation of contrary pasts. The resulting picture is an encouraging one of competition to help the schools (at the state and federal levels) cope with soaring enrollments, crumbling infrastructure, dangerous shortages of qualified teachers that are getting worse, and crowded classrooms. But it is misleading at the national level, because the key issue remains whether new resources will or won't be offered over the decade ahead, and the dividing line between George W. Bush and Al Gore is that Gore will and Bush won't.
This is a good state in which to watch this fascinating dance because Missouri is unique in having hotly contested races for both governor and senator between ideological opposites that are dead even at this point.
And it is also a battleground state in the equally close race between Bush and Gore, a fact made even more salient by the fact that Missouri has voted against the presidential winner only once since World War II (for Adlai Stevenson in 1956). For the record, Delaware and Washington state also have tripleheaders going this year, but Gore appears more clearly ahead in each for now, and the Democratic gubernatorial candidates are solidly so.
Here, every syllable counts and is carefully measured, and education is most often the topic.
''All the candidates are very focused on it,'' says Roy Temple, the state Democratic Party's executive director. ''It is playing a significant role in both our top statewide contests as well as in the presidential campaign.''
So imagine my surprise the other evening to hear Republican gubernatorial nominee Jim Talent note in his first debate with state Treasurer Bob Holden in this southeastern Missouri town that he has made no proposal to introduce vouchers to the state system. Talent said they should be permitted at the local option of the major systems in Kansas City and St. Louis, but he didn't make a case.
How odd. Talent, a congressman from St. Louis, has been a movement conservative since going to Washington eight years ago, service that has included frequent support of voucher experiments. What is more, he is running as a critic of what he calls the inadequacy of the state's school funding record, citing too small a transfer of gambling tax receipts and a decline in the percentage of state spending going to the public schools to make the claim he can do more for education.
Ditto the Senate race, a grudge match between incumbent John Ashcroft, another movement conservative who nearly ran for president on social issues, and Democratic Governor Mel Carnahan.
As he campaigns, Ashcroft apes the progressives he despises in nonelection years, claiming to have supported a near doubling of federal education resources since his election in the supposedly revolutionary year of 1994. By today's relaxed standards, that is not entirely false, but Ashcroft is counting his votes for the catchall funding measures that have come to characterize the end of Congress's sessions; the more literal truth is that he voted against all seven of the relevant appropriations measures to come before him in this period.
He even has altered the record of his two terms as governor that preceded his Senate candidacy to further the goal of being perceived as a friend of public education. Earlier in the campaign, Ashcroft liked to say state education aid had gone up by more than 50 percent when he was governor. Now he is claiming 85 percent, including money for desegregation efforts toward which he was such an obstacle at the time that he never requested so much as a dime for them. Oh well.
Governor Bush is no different. Though he has proposed letting the basic federal aid program go directly to parents of kids in ''failing'' schools as vouchers, his campaign forbids use of the word. All he will say these days when pressed is that he favors ''real options'' like tutoring or transfers to other public schools, and he mirrors Talent in saying real choice programs in education should be left to state and local discretion.
When they took Congress in 1994, conservatives were bold, proud, and assertive. Today they are mere shadows of their former selves. In politics, however, me-tooism is more often the defeatism that precedes defeat.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is t-oliphant@globe.com.
