Gore and Biden fall well short, not just of their professed ideals, but of the American average. Typically, about two-thirds of U.S. households report charitable donations, averaging about 3 percent of income.

Numerous liberal icons have been revealed as hypocrites. Last year, Sen. John Kerry was caught docking his $7 million yacht in Rhode Island to dodge the higher taxes in his home state of Massachusetts. As Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, documents in his book "Makers and Takers," Kerry's charitable donations are paltry: In 1995, a year in which he bought a painting for half a million dollars, he donated nothing. Last year the Clintons spent $2 million to $5 million on daughter Chelsea's wedding, an $11,000 gluten-free cake included.

It's a close call, but perhaps the gold medal for liberal hypocrisy should go to John Edwards. While lamenting "the two Americas," Edwards was living in a 28,000-square-foot palace and paying as much as $1,250 for a haircut. A haircut.

These extreme examples of Gilded Age ostentation on the part of those who, in Edmund Burke's words, "pretend to a great zeal for the poor" are not atypical. They are especially egregious examples of a consistent gap between liberal rhetoric and conduct. Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Who Really Cares," has found that "studies have consistently shown that people on the political right outperform those on the left when it comes to charity." Those describing themselves as "very conservative" gave 4.5 percent of their income to charity; the "very liberal" gave 1.2 percent. The "conservative" or "very conservative" made up 42 percent of the population surveyed but gave 56 percent of the total charitable donations; the "liberal" and "very liberal" were 29 percent of those surveyed but gave just 7 percent of donations. This disparity cannot be explained by religion: "secular conservatives are now outperforming their secular liberal counterparts." Conservatives also do more charitable volunteering.

How much praise is due these politicians for voting and otherwise advocating for the poor while failing to personally act on this ideal? Perhaps ordinary people deserve some credit for imposing greater tax burdens on themselves. But those who seek to gain political power at the slight cost of higher personal taxes — if they actually pay them — deserve no more credit than a slave-owning abolitionist.

Liberals often argue that poverty is a "social problem" that requires a collective solution. This is a dodge. If one believes that it is a moral imperative to help those in need, it ought to be done regardless of what others do. Who would argue that racism is a social problem so I won't stop being a racist until everyone else does? An individual who saw a dozen people drowning and refused to save any of them because she could not save them all, or because others refused to help, is guilty of faulty moral reasoning or something worse. Something like gross hypocrisy.

Indeed, some social problems require collective action: reducing my carbon footprint by installing solar panels is purely gestural, accomplishing nothing measurable. Driving a Prius results in one car out of hundreds of millions leaving a smaller carbon footprint (assuming that the carbon dioxide generated by the mostly coal-produced electricity does not exceed that of a gasoline car).

But real good is done by relieving the poverty of some even if the "social problem" of poverty remains. If Edwards or Kerry or Gore had given shelter to Hurricane Katrina refugees, the lives of those individuals would have been made better. An unrepaired cleft palate is terribly disfiguring and disabling, ruining the lives of those who survive childhood. At a cost of $250 per case, the organization Smile Train could, with the $9 million Gore spent on his new home, transform the lives of 36,000 children in poor countries.

I am unaware of any data on this, but I concede that liberals are more likely to drive a Prius and recycle their garbage. It is curious that they seem to prefer cost-free gestures of conscience over doing measureable good for real individuals. Perhaps this is the modern version of the doctrine of faith over good works.

While the moral exhibitionists of liberalism deride compassionate conservatism as an oxymoron, conservatives do more to actually improve the lives of the needy.

David Rubinstein is a professor emeritus in the department of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Boulder, Colo.