Listening to the campaign messages, it would appear the two S.C. candidates for U.S. Senate lead double lives.

Democrat Inez Tenenbaum accuses Republican Jim DeMint of masking a hardhearted ideology that would siphon money and benefits away from middle- and working-class Americans, while presenting himself as a conventional conservative.

DeMint accuses Tenenbaum of concealing an ultra-liberal bent that would make her Senate office a haven for abortionists, trial lawyers and union chiefs, while presenting herself as a conventional moderate.

“Jim DeMint is supporting a radical agenda that is not in touch with South Carolina,” Tenenbaum said.

“I can’t find a moderate position in her past, and I think it would be hard to make the case, if anyone looked, that she has a moderate bone in her body,” DeMint said.

Lately, both candidates have stepped up the rhetoric on the other’s supposed duplicity. But, experts say, the two candidates really are trying to avoid having to discuss beliefs they know would be unpopular with large numbers of S.C. voters.

SALES TAX STAND AT ISSUE

A closer look at DeMint’s stand on a national sales tax tests the fairness of Tenenbaum’s charges.

A similar examination of Tenenbaum’s stand on abortion and her relationship to her party tests the fairness of DeMint’s.

Tenenbaum has called DeMint’s promotion of a 23-cent national sales tax the “most radical plan anyone running for Senate has ever offered.”

She calls the plan regressive, in that poorer people spend a greater proportion of their incomes than do the wealthy. Her campaign Friday touted a study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan tax policy research organization, saying 95 percent of South Carolinians would pay higher taxes under DeMint’s plan.

DeMint, who also wants to do away with the federal income tax, says people of all incomes will benefit when the tax system rewards saving over spending.

Is a national sales tax radical? It would represent a sea change in the American tax system, but the idea has more than fringe followers.

Conservative think tanks — such as the Cato Institute in Washington and the Hoover Institute in California — are full of economists who believe in it.

And a House bill that calls for a 23 percent national sales tax has 54 co-sponsors, including DeMint.

President Bush last month called a national sales tax the “kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously,” though the next day two Bush advisers said the White House was not considering the idea.

The Tenenbaum campaign said DeMint also is trying to avoid the issue and points to a June Washington Post article in which DeMint is quoted as saying, “That’s not an argument I’m going to win on the campaign trail.”

DeMint said he has hesitated to talk to reporters about the plan because he doesn’t feel he gets treated fairly on the issue, not because he wants to conceal his position.

He has been far more assertive about his other, perhaps more popular, views on taxes — ditching the Internal Revenue Service and the federal tax code, for example.

In 2000, he threw it — thousands of pages of the federal tax code — out of a hot air balloon over Greenville.

But a review of news stories, press releases and articles on DeMint show that he has talked consistently about a national sales tax since he first ran for the House in 1998.

In a December 2002 interview with The State newspaper in which DeMint confirmed his intentions to run for Senate, for example, he broached the topic himself.

Still, said Bruce Ransom, a Clemson University political science professor, it is too easy for politicians to blame the media as an excuse for not discussing a tough issue.

“It remains that he said he is not going to campaign on something he stands for,” Ransom said.

GOP TARGETS ABORTION STANCE

The DeMint campaign says Tenenbaum has attached herself to groups that eschew traditional S.C. values yet tries to fool voters by publicly distancing herself from these groups.

As proof, they offer the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has paid for tens of thousands of dollars in television advertisements that blast DeMint.

But Tenenbaum made only a cursory appearance at the Democratic National Convention. She has not invited Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to campaign with her in South Carolina.

And she goes out of her way to call herself an independent.

Tenenbaum has taken a similarly deceptive stance on abortion, DeMint spokesman Terry Sullivan said.

In the early 1990s, Tenenbaum lobbied the S.C. Legislature to expand abortion rights. She is a “featured candidate” for Emily’s List, a Washington group that contributes to female candidates who support abortion rights. Emily’s List so far has raised more than $400,000 for Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum tries to make her support for abortion appear moderate, Sullivan said.

For instance, he accused her of disingenuously claiming to support the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion. But Tenenbaum said she can’t support the ban that passed in Congress last year because it does not make exceptions for the health of the mother.

However, including those exceptions would weaken the ban so much that it could no longer be considered a ban, Sullivan said.

Tenenbaum spokesman Adam Kovacevich said there is nothing contradictory about supporting both the ban and an exception to protect a mother’s health.

Last month, a federal judge struck down the law as unconstitutional because it does not include a health exception.

If Tenenbaum doesn’t talk much on the campaign trail about her support for choice, that’s because it’s not a key issue for most voters, Kovacevich said.

It is easy to conclude, though, that Tenenbaum wants to keep the spotlight off an abortion position she has worked hard in the past to advance. The issue is not mentioned on her campaign Web site, for example.

But, in her bid for the Senate, such views could alienate significant portions of the S.C. electorate who don’t share them.

University of South Carolina political science professor Blease Graham said it’s more difficult to indict Tenenbaum for keeping a low-profile relationship with her party.

“It’s not hypocrisy; it’s political necessity,” he said. “The old days of sharp distinctions between the parties are gone. Today, individual candidates make specific appeals to specific groups of people.”

OTHERS SHUN EXTREMIST LABELS

Outside the campaigns, South Carolinians are not so eager to see the candidates as Jekyll-and-Hyde opportunists running for the Senate.

Even devoted party members stop short of describing a closet extremist on the other ticket.

Betty Fant of Lexington is a member of the Democratic Party’s state executive committee who is campaigning hard for Tenenbaum.

As for DeMint, she said he seems like a nice enough person, but she considers his national tax plan a bad deal for most voters. She would not call it radical, however.

“For some people,” she said, “it might be a good deal. I don’t know.”

And Tim Miller, chairman of the Lexington County Republican Party, is campaigning for DeMint.

He said Tenenbaum is out of step with most South Carolinians, but he didn’t want to hear anyone call her dishonest.

“Inez’s campaign is presenting her just the way she is,” he said. “They’re not disingenuous, and any Republican who says that is wrong.”

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com.