A return match awaits voters in the 4th Congressional District on Election Day. Melissa Hart, formerly a three-term incumbent and a rising star in a Republican Congress, was one of those brought to account for her party's failures in the election two years ago. Now she returns in the hopes of unseating her former challenger, Democrat Jason Altmire.

What has she learned in her exile from Washington? Sadly, it seems, not very much. While now she puts a John McCain-like distance between herself and the Bush administration, whose policies she once championed with few exceptions, she offers little new for voters in the district, which includes northern Allegheny County, all of Beaver and Lawrence counties and parts of Butler, Mercer and Westmoreland counties.

She is still an apologist for the ill-advised invasion of Iraq, still doesn't understand that the best way to stop the war draining American coffers to the tune of $10 billion a month -- this at a time when the nation's economy desperately needs help at home -- is to insist that the Iraqis take responsibility for their own country. Instead, she sees the strategic success of the surge as both justification for the war and continuation of our debilitating presence.

On the energy crisis, she has hitched herself to a bandwagon on a short-term journey -- the need for offshore drilling, something that Congress has addressed, although not to her satisfaction. While she talks a good game on other energy sources, her politically calculated push for more drilling shows where her real priorities lie: a fossil-fuel solution, which in the long term is no solution for America and is vintage George W. Bush.

Ms. Hart, 46, of Bradford Woods, says she would have probably voted against the recent financial bailout -- which is what Mr. Altmire, 40, of McCandless did.

Voters looking for a more defining issue could do no worse than Ms. Hart's lack of concern about the outrageous Supreme Court case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a Goodyear rubber plant supervisor and longtime victim of gender-based pay discrimination denied compensation by activist justices of the right-wing stripe.

In a meeting with the Post-Gazette editorial board, she said she was "vaguely familiar with it." Vaguely familiar? She is a lawyer who represents business people and this was a highly publicized case involving the rights of female workers. While she said she might vote to rectify the loophole created by the Supreme Court, after the case was explained to her, those in her district who work for a living should note her lack of curiosity about basic fairness in the workplace.

But how much Melissa Hart has not grown as a politician is not the main argument for voters sticking with their earlier judgment; it is equally a case of how much the incumbent, Jason Altmire, has grown.

He has been a hard-working centrist, always attentive to his constituents' wishes and unusually effective for a freshman congressman. The evidence is most notable in the area of veterans' issues. He has fought hard to ensure that our troops and veterans receive a fair shake from their country.

He has pushed a half-dozen pieces of legislation that include provisions such as ensuring that injured soldiers are not denied benefits they were promised at enlistment, improving the screening and treatment of traumatic brain injuries for the wounded and providing tax relief to active-duty military personnel during tough times.

Ms. Hart is right to say that Mr. Altmire has not been able to do all he wanted to do on his signature issue, health care -- that will take a Democrat as president. But he has not been idle. For example, he pushed legislation to protect low-income seniors from paying a late enrollment fee if they did not sign up for prescription drug coverage for Medicare Part D.

On Iraq, Mr. Altmire understands what most Americans have come to believe -- that we should be planning to leave (but he has not voted to take away funding from the troops in the field). He also knows about the injustice done to Lilly Ledbetter. For all these reasons, the Post-Gazette endorses Jason Altmire in the 4th Congressional District.