Grassroots support for the AmeriCorps has grown, but is it enough to overcome recent legislative action?

There are two ways to look at the dramatic funding crisis that in the last month has nearly crippled AmeriCorps, the nation’s premier national service program:

It’s either a sure sign that the “compassionate conservatism” of the Bush White House and the party in power on Capitol Hill is no more than rhetoric and that they have no clue of the value of well-organized, substantive national service.

Or, it was an inspiring example of how support for national service has taken root among Americans thirsting to make a civic contribution that goes beyond bake sales and charity ballgames.

“The debate over national service is a debate over how we Americans think of ourselves,” write E.J. Dionne and Kayla Meltzer Drogosz in the introduction to “United We Serve,” a new book just published by the Brookings Institution (in which I also wrote a chapter).

So the debate over the future of AmeriCorps will signal something either very disturbing or very hopeful.

It’s not over yet. And how it ends in the coming days will tell us a lot about ourselves.

Recently the Senate easily beat back an attempt to drop an emergency $100 million appropriation for AmeriCorps from a larger spending bill and then swiftly approved the entire package.

The $100 million is only half of what proponents say is needed to counteract the harmful cuts initiated last month in response to accounting problems, overzealous hiring and funding restraints imposed by Congress. But it’s likely all they could get, and they’re satisfied.

Now comes the “real” obstacle: The U.S. House, where stubborn ideological opposition has dogged this program, threatening to make serious mischief at every turn. Worse yet is the White House, which says all the right things and does none of them.

The $100 million question won’t come before the House; the leadership there has made sure of that. The best hope is that it will survive the conference deliberations over the larger spending bill expected to begin this week.

The forced departure of Leslie Lenkowsky, the head of the Corporation for National Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, was a bone to those who contended that he (a Bush appointee) had mismanaged the agency. Mind you, there was no fraud alleged, no embezzlement, no misleading statements on nuclear weapons, no loss of life or limb.

There was, simply, a bureaucratic failure to manage the abundance of Americans who answered the president’s call for service and applied for the modest stipend and education grant given to AmeriCorps members for a year of service in the nation’s schools, neighborhoods and great outdoors. Congress put a 50,000-person cap on the number of new hires, and the program exceeded that – only because “so many Americans wanted to serve.

This should be our biggest problem.

But, in fact, the biggest problem is the persistent shibboleth that there’s something poisonous about federally-managed national service of the non-military variety. The biggest cause for hope is that this funding crisis has exposed the vast, grassroots support for AmeriCorps that has developed since the program began a decade ago.

In the last few weeks alone, public expressions of support have been signed by 1,200 service organizations, 135 mayors, more than 200 CEOs and countless ordinary Americans of all political persuasions. Dozens of editorials have supported AmeriCorps, with nary a word of dissent.

And many who had been skeptical of this so-called “paid volunteerism” have been brave enough to change their minds. Sen. Rick Santorum’s evolution is a case in point. Once he derided AmeriCorps; last week, the Pennsylvania Republican lobbied fellow lawmakers and the White House to keep the $100 million alive.

“Some in Congress just see this as “a program,”‘ he told me. “The challenge is to promote a vision of service and the importance of it.”

How this story ends will tell us a lot. Either we as a nation show a steady commitment to provide a government infrastructure for meaningful national service, or we continue to subject well-intentioned volunteers and struggling agencies to a hypocritical mixed message.

“The uncertainty over the years has been incredibly trying. Now it’s devastating,” says Chuck Supple, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Service and Volunteerism in California, where the AmeriCorps allocation went from 6,000 members this year, down to 825 next year, then up to 2,066 … unless it changes again.

“It’s been a roller coaster ride for years,” he adds. “That’s not how you build long-term partnerships with communities.”

And it is also not how we as a nation encourage active citizenship among an often-cynical and disengaged populace, especially the young. Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who for two years now has sponsored legislation with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to dramatically broaden national service, is worried that the momentum begun after Sept. 11 is dissipating.

“We’re at the cusp of losing a tremendous opportunity,” he told me last week. “We’re calling upon Americans to serve their country, but we are unwilling to provide the means to do that.”

Choices have to be made. What kind of America do we want to be?

Jane R. Eisner is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.