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“Something is going on,” said Ross Clayton, dean of the USC School of Public Administration. “We’re getting some of the brightest kids again.”

What is going on? Just ask John Emerson. As a top aide in the presidential campaigns of former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, the issues he faced were global: war and peace and preservation. Afterward, his duties as a partner in a big Westside law firm--such as representing the interests of metallic balloon manufacturers--seemed trivial.

So in 1987, Emerson snapped up an appointment as chief deputy city attorney for Los Angeles. Today, at 36, he has a voice on virtually every policy question confronting the city, from crime and gangs to housing and development.

“We’re seeing a dynamic, an understanding among thinking people, that we need to wake up after years of government slumber,” he said. “Not since the days of (President John F. Kennedy’s) Camelot has there been a more exciting time to be in government. Because you can have a real hand in shaping solutions.”

Gradually, the word is getting out. College enrollments in public affairs are on the rise after a decade of steep decline. Political debate increasingly stresses a government role in social problems.

And after years of budget constraints, some of the bureaucracy is thinned out. Today men and women in their 30s are routinely called upon to shoulder important work: How to manage growth. How to control pollution. How to operate public services for a demographically changing society. What works in other places that might work here? Invention and innovation are rewarded. The range of possibilities is seemingly boundless.

Carol Baker Tharp is the Southern California executive director of the CORO Foundation, which has groomed young people for public affairs leadership roles for almost 50 years. “There is a big difference between making a living and making a life,” she said. “And to me, public service has to do with making a life. That’s what I tell young people.”

Among people who have made the switch from private-sector jobs to policy-level jobs in the public sector, it is not uncommon to hear them say they work twice as hard and have twice the satisfaction.

Yet, as everyone knows, public service has taken a beating for much of a generation.

Graying civil servants recall that magical day of Jan. 29, 1960, when Kennedy touched the idealistic dreams of countless millions: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

From those heady times, things went sour. Idealism suffered from assassinations and resistance to civil rights. America grew restless over Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, cynical about Richard Nixon and Watergate, and disappointed over the regular-Joe presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. So by the time Ronald Reagan came along, it was easy to believe that government was America’s problem, not the solution.

Today’s many sundry scandals only punctuate the point: Too often, public service has attracted neither America’s best nor its brightest.

Now, though, people in government say they feel a change in the air. A shifting in values in which yuppie is a pejorative, in which ostentatious displays of wealth generate criticism more than envy, in which idealism emerges on movie and television screens to challenge selfish individualism.

Caren Daniels-Meade is an example. Five years ago when she was 34, Good Housekeeping named her one of the 100 most promising young women in America. She was the press secretary for March Fong Eu, California’s secretary of state.

She could have been bought out of government easily as she strived to live up to the magazine’s expectations. But she’s still there, serving as chief of the office’s Elections Division, with oversight over voter registration and the conduct of state elections.

“For me, (public service) offers a sense of having a role, a sense of accomplishment,” she said. “And I feel morally good about myself.”

These notions seem to be moving that most important barometer: the actions of young people.

Enrollment is up an estimated 10% this year and applications up 24% in graduate programs of public affairs, according to Alfred Zuck, executive director of the National Assn. of Schools of Public Affairs in Washington.

USC’s Clayton predicts that the trend will accelerate. One reason is the explosion of democratic revolution in East Europe. Looking across the Atlantic and witnessing what people can do when they join together in common purpose, youth here may no longer casually regard problems at home as intractable.

Pollster Paul Maslin says: “Almost wistfully, a lot of Americans, particularly young people, do want to have some greater purpose and meaning in their lives. So when they watch this sequence of events--and this is real stuff, people gaining their freedom--it can’t help but energize people in this country.”

Indeed, for Americans intrigued by the prospects of public service, the biggest questions may be: where to go, where to start, where is the opportunity?

The National Commission on Public Service, which is winding down after a three-year effort to study and promote the cause, points to a broad resurgence in public service--in community work, in volunteerism, in state and local government jobs.

But the picture is mixed. Americans remain aloof to working for the federal government. “People seem to want to be somewhere where they can actually see the results of their work. And the federal government does not always provide that,” said a spokesman for the commission directed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul A. Volcker.

Between 1988 and 2000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics foresees an 8.4% increase in general government jobs, 7.6% in state and local government hospital employment and a 12.9% increase in education employment--nearly 1.5 million new jobs total.

Interest in public service is not limited to the young. Emerson recalls a recent conversation with a long-ago college friend, a successful accountant and management consultant:

“I told him what I was doing. He says to me, ‘Wow, government and politics--that’s great, I’d really like to do that.’ And he really was interested in how he could get plugged into government.

“Five years ago that would have been a different conversation.”