WASHINGTONConservatism in Texas desperately needs the veneer of compassion, which is supplied by the ideologically nimble George W. Bush as if he were seeking absolution, not solutions.
There is, after all, so much to be compassionate about in the vast policy wasteland of Texas. And from a governor whose leading guru has a strange explanation for the societal ills that affect Texas almost more than any other state: the '60s.
Myron Magnet's assignment of blame is not to the '60s as experienced by the president-in-waiting -- a boozy, frat house mediocrity that afflicted him well into the 1980s. No, it was the ''liberal'' 1960s, whose cultural and political causes deprived the poor of their initiative and led them to fail to take advantage of the limitless opportunities set before them years later by Ronald Reagan.
Oh, really.
Magnet, one of the mainstays of the New York-based Manhattan Institute, has been supplying Bush with conceptual drivel since the year before Bush ran for governor.
Another think tank has had special meaning for Bush, the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Alternatives. Its president, John Goodman, is also a health-care adviser to the GOP front-runner and was a key appointee to a Texas commission examining a problem Texas faces like no other state - one in four residents has no insurance. Ideally, Goodman would privatize both Social Security and Medicare and substitute the magic of tax credits, as well as jettison such enemies of the work ethic as unemployment insurance.
Compassionate conservatism confronts an immense landscape in Texas, which shares with other state laboratories of the true faith an aversion to local effort where the poor, social services, and the public health are concerned, in favor of a reliance on the federal government for what few policy crumbs their residents manage to get.
Consider what requires compassion, a partial snapshot courtesy of that most relentless of Web sites, www.Bushwatch.com:
Since Bush became governor in 1995, Texas has consistently been first in its vast population of the uninsured. It is sometimes first, sometimes second in uninsured kids, but consistently first among women.
It is also first in measured releases of toxic junk into the air, and Houston leads in the country in its annual number of smog-alert days.
Texas is third in the incidence of hunger and fifth in its birth rate for kids born to teenage parents.
Moving toward the bottom of the barrel, Texas is 45th in women's prenatal care. It is 46th in state effort for public libraries and protection of water resources, as well as high school completion rates. Texas is 47th in the delivery of social services. And it is 48th in its public health expenditures per capita, as well as its effort on parks and recreation and the arts. It was rated the 48th best state in which to raise children.
The good governor's ''self-policing'' attitude toward polluters helps account for Texas's ranking of 49th in state effort on environmental protection. And the state brings up the rear in its teacher salaries and benefits.
Never one to rest on laurels, Governor Bush has in the last couple of years been a pioneer in the abuse of welfare ''reform'' to reduce health care for children even more. The replacement of an income maintenance entitlement with work was not supposed to affect families' eligibility for Medicaid; but it has.
And a new, bipartisanly supported effort to supplement Medicaid with a federal-state program to insure kids was not supposed to be used as a cover for Medicaid-slashing, but it has been.
Once again, Texas leads.
In a study of 12 major states by Families USA, Bush's Texas was by far the leader in producing since 1996 a net decline in the number of kids covered under Medicaid and the new children's insurance program, compared to those covered undered Medicaid alone before. The decline was a whopping 14.2 percent, and the numerical drop in kids' coverage (193,400) exceeded California's by more than 50 percent.
Goodman's policy wonkery will presumably help Bush cure both Texas's and the country's health care problems. In the meantime, like his protege, he opposes any expansion of national efforts to help working families afford health insurance.
This, Myron Magnet would argue, is the essence of compassion. In his 1993 tome ''The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass,'' Magnet explains that counter-culture permissiveness and the War on Poverty persuaded the poor, and especially young, black males to prefer indolence to effort. Magnet did not explain why this persuasion was so much more successful in Texas.
In his preoccupation with black people as the core of the underclass, Magnet is also less helpful in dealing with the country's expanding Hispanic population, which comprises half of Texas's nation-leading uninsured ranks. How the counter-culture destroyed the initiative of Hispanics may be a fertile field for conservative intellectuals.
In the meantime, the compassion proclaimed to be so widespread in George W. Bush's Texas may look to the rest of us like official indifference and cruelty.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
