WASHINGTON — In case you hadn’t noticed it, Vermont Senator Jim
Jeffords announced last Wednesday that he won’t seek re-election.
After 17 years in the Senate, he’s packing up and going home.
Don’t feel bad if you did miss it. Few in the media thought it
was a big deal. The Washington Post reported it on page
A-7 and the New York Times on page A-15.
The Wall Street Journal devoted exactly one sentence to
it. The Journal must have needed the space for “Hotel
Industry Begins to Wake Up to Bedbug Problem.”
It was a stark change from four years ago. Back then, Jeffords
was the most important person in Congress. His 2001 decision to
abandon the GOP and deliver control to the Democrats was — rightly
— called a political earthquake. Pundits fawned all over him, some
even comparing him to Abraham Lincoln.
The moment proved to be fleeting, though, and Jeffords soon
returned to his prior obscurity. His moment of fame and adoration
will almost certainly be remembered as an odd blip in an otherwise
thoroughly unremarkable career — if he’s lucky. In reality, it was
just about the dumbest thing he ever did.
Granted, it didn’t seem that way at the time. In fact, it looked
like pretty savvy maneuver. He was able to dump his own party for
political gain and yet get the media to cast it as a matter of the
highest, noblest principle.
But if was a matter of principle, why exactly did Jeffords wait
until 2001? After all, he had long been a liberal uncomfortable
inside his own party.
He was, to cite just one example, the only Republican House
member to vote against Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981. Yet he
never seriously thought about leaving the GOP until after the 2000
election.
The key factor in 2001 was that the Senate was split 50-50. If
he switched Senate Democrats would owe him big time for bringing
them to power.
Democrats Harry Reid and Tom Daschle sweetened the deal by
promising him the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works
Committee, which Jeffords wanted badly.
He also had to know that if he waited any longer, Daschle and
Reid might not be so generous. South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond,
then 98, had recently been the subject of a series of ghoulish stories alleging he could drop dead at any minute,
tilting Senate control to the Democrats all by himself.
So, on May 24, 2001, he made the jump. Overnight Jeffords became
a political superstar, a hero to Democrats still smarting over the
Florida recount. Senator John Kerry was reported to have literally
skipped through the Senate halls.
The media meanwhile regurgitated the Democrats’ spin.
Jeffords’ “unassuming demeanor draws comparisons to Jimmy
Stewart in ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’” said the Washington
Post. E.J. Dionne argued, with no apparent irony, “Jeffords’s
departure may have been a profound act of loyalty toward his fellow
embattled moderates.”
The New York Times engaged in some particularly naked
schadenfreude. “The Mean Strategy Backfires” said columnist Bob
Herbert, arguing the Republican extremists had forced Jeffords to
do it.
Maureen Dowd wrote a dippy — even by her standards — fantasy
in which a ghostly Prescott Bush dressed down his grandson for
being a “bully” to Jeffords.
Republicans who pointed out that Jeffords had, in fact, betrayed
them for a chairmanship were dismissed as sore losers.
For a guy like Jeffords who rarely got noticed in Washington, it
had to be intoxicating. But if he had paid more attention he’d had
noticed that his new admirers didn’t really love him. Rather, they
loved what he did: give Bush and the GOP an embarrassing black
eye.
Once the excitement died down, it turned out that Jeffords’s
power in Washington had actually diminished. The new 51-seat
Democratic majority couldn’t do much for him and the Republicans
weren’t about to forget his betrayal.
Unlike Senators John McCain or Chuck Hagel, he had lost the
power to wring concessions from Republican leaders on tight votes.
By switching parties, Jeffords had no trump card left to play.
His two biggest concerns, funding a 1975 education bill he wrote
and a maintaining a price-fixing cartel for New England dairy
farmers, quickly fell by the wayside.
By December of 2001, the New Republic reported that
Jeffords was despondent over his situation and venting to the
Democratic leadership.
“For an afternoon, a few senators actually wondered if he could
possibly do the unthinkable — switch back,” TNR’s Michael
Crowley reported.
He must have been even more depressed the following year when
the GOP returned to the majority and Jeffords lost his chairmanship
and what remaining clout he had. Instead he had to watch as McCain
and Hagel became powerbrokers.
After 9/11, Jeffords’s switch became a faint memory. The biggest
issue surrounding his departure is whether it’ll enable Vermont
Congressman Bernie Sanders to become the Senate’s first (avowed)
socialist.
And so the great irony of Jeffords’s career is that the one time
he showed genuine political savvy, even cunning, it actually turned
out to be the biggest miscalculation he ever made.
He made his mark all right. But it was as an example of what not
to do.
