A pliable boom

Spectator, The, Jun 2, 2001 by Steyn, Mark

Mark Steyn on why Senator Jeffords finally defected - and why the Republicans need not worry

Burlington, Vermont

`JIM's a rock star now!' raved one local politician of the decaff-latte persuasion as Senator Jeffords brushed past and a cheering throng swept us into the packed lobby of the Radisson Hotel. Jim, who normally looks as if someone's twisting a pineapple up his bottom, seemed eerily relaxed, enjoying his new-found eminence as the world's most famous obscure senator.

But I don't think he's a rock star. He's more Peter Tork from the Monkees, if you can imagine Peter flouncing off in a huff and joining the Partridge Family. Just over a week ago, Jim Jeffords was an amiable goof, whose three-decade 'Republican' voting record read like a guy who's holding the road map upside down - he voted against Reagan's tax cut but for Hillary's health plan, against Clarence Thomas but for partial-birth abortion. This is what we in the media call 'a force for moderation'. But it took a most immoderate act to secure Jim his place in history: in quitting his party, he's ended the GOP's hold on America's longest continuously held Senate seat - Republican for 140 years. Better yet, he's brought a dash of Westminster horse-trading, a touch of Italian coalition politics to Washington: for the first time in US history, control of the Senate is passing from one party to another without anything so tiresome as an election.

The constitutional propriety of this has mostly gone unremarked. In Burlington, a leathery old plaid-clad lesbian lectured me about Bush's 'illegitimacy' and the Supreme Court's `post-election coup'. But, if it's wrong to install Dubya in the White House through one vote from an 'ideological' judge, surely it's wrong to install Tom Daschle in the Senate Majority office through one vote from a senator peeved because Bush didn't invite him to the White House `Teacher of the Year' reception, even though the winning teacher was a Vermonter. Did I fall asleep and miss a constitutional amendment? Or has this rule been around since 1787? `Any sitting senator who findeth himself excluded from ye presidential receptions such as, but not limited to, Teacher of the Year, Powdered Wig-maker of the Year and Buggy-Whip Manufacturer of the Year, hath the right to remove all officers of the Senate save himself from their posts.' On such minutiae do empires rise and fall. Who knows? When Gavril Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and plunged the world into war, maybe he was steamed at not getting an invite to the Sarajevo Teacher of the Year all-U-can-eat buffet.

The press has roundly castigated Bush for his 'meanness' and 'pettiness' over the Teacher-of-the-Year guest-list, and they may have a point, though not the one they think they have. For my part, I only wish the Right were as tough as the other crowd. Last week, before Jeffords flew the coop, the Democrats were keeping the oldest Republican senator, Strom Thurmond, on the floor hour after hour in one frivolous roll call after another, declining to let him 'pair' with a Democrat and so retire early. The genial old sex fiend is 98 and as hot for the gals as ever. But ever since the election the media have been running a ghoulish Strom deathwatch: all it Would take is a particularly nubile intern to come jogging braless round the Capitol and the 50-50 Senate would belong to the Democrats. Last week, as they put the 1948 Segregationist candidate for president through 18-hour days of pointless procedural mischief, it was as if Minority Leader Tom Daschle and his troops had decided they'd waited long enough for of Strom to kick off, and it was time to hasten the process. On the Monday, some of the old boy's Republican colleagues were worried that he wouldn't last the night. You gotta hand it to those Dems: there's a party that knows how to play hardball. They don't just tear up your Teacher of the Year invite, they measure you up for the Coffin of the Year competition.

No one's taken a keener interest in Strom's health than Jim Jeffords. The November election had left one otherwise unimportant man a window of opportunity, which wouldn't last for ever: Jeffords figured that, if Strom did keel over, Daschle would take charge of the Senate and owe Jim nothing; he'd be just another out-of-work GOP committee chairman. The Republican establishment in Washington claims not to have been aware that Jeffords was checking out until last Tuesday, which is very probably true given the general doziness with which Trent Lott and co. have presided over the Senate. On the other hand, my friend Tom, who's currently painting my house and goes drinking with a tattooist who's well-connected in Vermont Republican circles, told me three months ago that Jeffords was planning to quit the GOP. That sounds more like it.

It's not entirely true that until last week Jim was entirely unknown outside Vermont. At my place in New Hampshire, the only TV station I can get is Channel 3 from Burlington, so I never hear anything about the Granite State's cheerfully insane rightwing senators, but night after night the local news is full of Jim - Jim with dairy farmers, Jim with schoolkids, Jim announcing he's secured another X billion dollars for some idiot Federal programme. Even if you had no idea that he belonged to the GOP's 'moderate' wing, his campaign ads always suggested a certain sheepishness about his party: he was 'proud', he told Vermonters during November's campaign, to have received the support of so many `Independents, Democrats and Republicans' - this last word mumbled sotto voce, like a schoolboy asking the pharmacist for condoms. You run into him everywhere in Vermont - county fairs, that sort of thing - everywhere, that is, except Republican party events, which he pretty much stopped going to because he always got booed.