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The Meaning of Switcher Jim: Sense and nonsense in the Jeffords fallout
National Review, June 25, 2001 by Richard Lowry
It's the South Carolina primary and the John Ashcroft nomination rolled into one-with a dash of arsenic thrown in. It's an occasion for all the independent minds-namely, the media, Democrats, and GOP moderates-to make every argument possible for one grand proposition: that the Bush operation, and the Republican party generally, are just too right-wing. It's an occasion for Rick Berke of the New York Times to talk to all these independent minds and file a report: Dateline Washington-Everyone agrees, the Bush Republicans are just too right-wing. It's an event that will live on for months, if not years, as support for every hostile cliche about the GOP-it's the apotheosis of Jim Jeffords, patron saint of bipartisan toleration.
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It used to be that it took a Willie Horton ad or an attack on Murphy Brown to get a Republican labeled as "intolerant" or "divisive." Now, it's just a matter of leaning on senators to try to pass a tax cut. It used to be that Republican "moderates" supposedly recoiled from conservative orthodoxy on abortion, but were fiscal conservatives. Now, it's fiscal conservatism itself that is driving them out of the party. The Jeffords jump, in short, provided an opportunity for media liberals and GOP moderates to nudge conservatism a bit further into disrespectability, and to try to knock Bush off his governing agenda. So, in the days after the switch, Bush's critics unloaded, selectively deploying the swear words of the Establishment, and a collection of arguments that are unfair, or contradictory, or both.
Take one of those swear words: "intolerant." A Washington Post editorial paraphrased Jeffords's farewell speech approvingly: "The [Republican] party had strayed . . . perhaps from tolerance most of all." Now, Republicans weren't destroying religious art or otherwise assaulting pluralism. What Jeffords and the Post were objecting to were the mundane operations of party discipline, the strong-arming that attends passing a president's program. Tom Daschle employed exactly the same tactics in opposing Bush. But no one called Daschle intolerant. In fact, Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote that he "is notoriously respectful of dissenters"-the very same day her newspaper reported that Daschle had lashed Montana senator Max Baucus for working to pass the president's tax cut.
Many of the commentators couldn't keep straight whether the Jeffords switch was motivated by the GOP's petty intolerance (as exemplified by his non-invitation to an event honoring a Vermont teacher) or by his high principle. The petty explanation had its advantages, because it would make the White House seem not just immature (needing to "grow up," as John McCain famously put it), but stupid. Commentators relished remarking just how shortsighted, how unsophisticated, how dim it was to play vindictive hardball in a 50-50 Senate. But if Jeffords really switched over something as picayune as a White House invitation (and one that wasn't extended to any other senator or congressman either), he obviously wouldn't deserve his saintly, above-the-fray reputation. Newsweek's dreary Jonathan Alter, for one, squared this circle by concluding that the Jeffords switch had been brewing over philosophical differences for two decades-but that the White House needed to "grow up" anyway.
Another line of criticism had it that Bush forced Jeffords out by lurching right after the election. But Bush's critics refuse to distinguish between swinging right and simply continuing to hold a conservative position. So, for instance, it is the fate of Bush's opposition to funding for abortion services overseas to be continually portrayed as a rightward lurch. Sen. Susan Collins said after the Jeffords jump, "The president struck exactly the right tone in the campaign. But some of his actions since then, restricting international family planning, don't send that message." One Jeffords aide compared the international cut-off to "a kick in the stomach," which implies that it was something swift and unexpected. Yet Bush had enunciated his opposition to such abortion-related funding by November 1999. Eighteen months later, though, it is still talked about as if it were something Bush hadn't thought or mentioned until that dark day in January when he decided to govern as a conservative.
A variant of this critique has it that, as a post-Jeffords report in Time put it, "many of Bush's most conservative agenda items were hidden away in the campaign's fine print and covered over by his big messages about moderation and helping the little guy." It's true that Bush had a compassion rap in the campaign, but he still has one today, and he has attempted to act on his chief "compassionate" agenda items, reforming urban schools and supporting faith-based charities. As for "many" of his conservative policies being "hidden away," they must have been hidden, like the purloined letter, in plain view. Bush gave major speeches outlining his tax, Social Security, and missile-defense ideas, and talked about them at almost every campaign stop. Where was Time magazine?
