As mayor of Mount Pleasant, Tom Vilsack turned his town around after a grisly murder in the city council chambers.

As a state senator, he earned a reputation of being earnest, intense and persistent.

Now, Vilsack is the Democratic candidate for governor, and in polls taken late last week, he had drawn even with his opponent, Republican Jim Ross Lightfoot.

Vilsack said he will focus on education if elected.

“That’s at the center of everything we talk about,” he said in an interview during his return to Des Moines from a campaign event in Muscatine.

He listed several programs — providing child-raising information to parents of newborns, reducing class sizes, giving competency tests to third-graders and providing “innovative” options for calming disruptive children.

Also, Vilsack wants to eliminate the waiting list for at-risk children by expanding programs that promote self-esteem and teach coping skills. This would ensure that children from troubled homes will be more ready to learn when they arrive at their first day of school, he said.

Without any changes, many 4- and 5-year-olds would not get help because the current list is so long, Vilsack said.

After students leave high school, Vilsack plans to convince them to stay in Iowa with more state funding for community colleges and the three regents universities.

A problem in recent years has been the “brain drain” — college graduates who flee Iowa for big cities.

Vilsack said he would combat this exodus with forgivable loans for those who choose to work in Iowa, particularly teachers.

Taxes have been another issue throughout the campaign, with the candidates offering markedly different strategies.

Vilsack called Lightfoot’s “five-by-five” plan to cut income taxes “unworkable.”

He said the plan, which would lower the effective marginal rate 5 percent in five years, is “based on unrealistic assumptions of revenue growth for the state of Iowa.”

Vilsack would focus instead on the property tax.

He said the current method of taxing property penalizes senior citizens on fixed incomes, farmers, young couples and commercial property owners.

“Property taxes are significantly higher than they should be in this state,” Vilsack said.

“That slows the growth and expansion opportunities that might be available,” he said.

Vilsack also emphasizes the state’s ability to market value-added agriculture, the converting of corn, soybeans and other crops into consumer or industrial products.

Through research on food safety, nutrition, genetics and biotechnology, he said, “Iowa can be to food what the Silicon Valley is to computers.”