There is no purer political animal in Canadian public life than Jean Charest.

He speaks without notes, his English as fluent as his French, marred only by a weakness for throat-clearing catch-phrases: "I happen to think," "by the way," "let me share with you..." He is quick-witted, as much at ease before a crowd of 600 as he is greeting the staff at a Tim Horton's, remembers names by the hundred. A natural.

There is much of the Bill Clinton in him, with one difference: where Clinton's skill has been to make a liberal agenda sound conservative, Charest's is to make a conservative agenda sound liberal. The Tory platform, unveiled before the campaign to much fanfare, talked of tax cuts and repealing gun control. On the hustings, however, especially in Atlantic Canada, Charest speaks -- sings, really -- in tones that suggest his heart is in higher spending.

"Every morning," he tells the south shore crowd, the prime minister assembles his 31-member contingent of MPs from the region, telling them "go down to Atlantic Canada, and cut the unemployment insurance system, though we said we wouldn't. Go down and close those military bases, though we said we wouldn't. Go down and cut the TAGS program back to four years. Go down and reduce ACOA, though we said we would never do that either." Mind you, he never actually suggests he would reverse any of these decisions. He doesn't even say he was ever opposed to them. All he really says flat out is that with a stronger showing of Conservatives, Atlantic Canada would have more "voice" in these matters. That doesn't prevent his listeners from lending such meaning to his impassioned rhetoric -- even if he spent much of the same speech castigating the Liberals for their free- spending ways.

That, in a nutshell, is the art of politics, Charest-style. The Tory leader is sometimes accused of saying one thing in one part of the country and another, quite opposite elsewhere. But the truth is he doesn't have to. He is genuinely capable of convincing two groups of listeners that the same speech means two completely different things.

This appears to be his preferred route out of the box the Tories found themselves in, amid the wreckage of the great Tory coalition. The Conservative conundrum is not so much in describing what they are for, as what they are against.

Each of the other main parties can lay some credible claim to uniqueness, against the mass of undifferentiated others. It is Us against the federalists (in the case of the Bloc), Us against the right (the NDP), Us against the traditional parties (Reform), Us against an untried opposition (the Liberals). But what, or who, are the Tories against -- other than Brian Mulroney?

Charest's answer seems instead to say, we are for everybody, and everything.

We are for national testing in education and a vigorous use of the federal trade and commerce power -- as a gasping Gilles Duceppe correctly observed, even Pierre Trudeau did not dare go that far. Yet we are also for recognizing Quebec's "distinctiveness," or some such interpretive clause, in the constitution. (Lately, Charest has veered even harder into nationalist territory, describing Jean Chretien as "not really from Quebec," even suggesting he would consider the Parti Quebecois government's demand for $2-billion in "compensation" for harmonizing the provincial sales tax with the GST.)

We are against Plan B, he says, though we are in favour of Ottawa and the provinces setting clear rules in advance of the next referendum, which sounds a lot like it. We are for tax cuts, just like Reform, only faster: no waiting around for the budget to balance. Yet we are also against the Liberal cuts to health care and the CBC. We are against "massive devolution," he stresses, though we are for a total federal withdrawal from social transfers.

We believe job training is an exclusively provincial jurisdiction. At the same time, we are for using federal unemployment insurance benefits to train young people.

He is a remarkable talent: a Tory leader who can sound, by turns, like a Harrisite tax-cutter, a Trudeau federalist, a Bouchardian nationalist, even a New Democrat in a pinch, depending on his audience and their needs. Just as long as they don't compare notes.