THE BUZZ IN THE MEDIA after senator James Jeffords’s switch put Democrats in control of the Senate was that President Bush must change his ways. He has to become more moderate. Why? Because only that will prevent more Republican defections and it’s the president’s one hope for getting his agenda through Congress. This is wrong on both counts. Bush and GOP congressional leaders bent over backwards to accommodate Jeffords and liberal Democrats on education, the senator’s top priority. Jeffords bolted anyway. On taxes, Bush stuck with his conservative tax cut until nearly the end, when he compromised just enough to assure passage. Jeffords voted with him. The truth about the impact of Jeffords’s move is that no political earthquake has occurred. The Senate is ideologically unchanged. The swing votes in the Senate, including John McCain, are important, but they already were. There’s no clear path to victory for the Bush agenda, after taxes and education, but that was always true. To pass a patients’ bill of rights, a prescription drug benefit, or missile defense, a bipartisan coalition of some sort will be essential. Yes, there’s one big change with Democrats taking over: judges. Bush will have a harder time getting conservative nominees through a Senate Judiciary Committee run by Patrick Leahy of Vermont, perhaps the most partisan Democrat on Capitol Hill. One more downbeat side effect: Jeffords’s announcement overshadowed Bush’s tax cut victory, denying him any political momentum he might have gotten from it. The lesson here for Bush is that the best strategy is still the one that produced his greatest success, the tax cut. That means governing from the right, not the middle. If Bush starts with centrist proposals and then compromises with Democrats, he’ll wind up with center-left legislation. That’s what happened on education. But if he begins with conservative proposals and then goes after moderate Democrats, he’s likely to get a center-right result. More often than not, Bush will have to overcome the opposition of Tom Daschle, the new majority leader. Daschle has a single goal, keeping the Senate in Democratic hands in the 2002 election. To achieve this, he’s bent on denying Bush any victories. The Jeffords defection reflects a broader trend in national politics — the growing division between the culturally and ideologically liberal Northeast and coasts and the conservative heartland and South. And no state has trended to the left more dramatically in recent years than Vermont. This made it awkward for Jeffords, more a liberal than a moderate, to stay in a Senate GOP caucus dominated by conservatives such as Jesse Helms of North Carolina. For Bush, the message is that liberal regions won’t be wooed by compromises. Jeffords wasn’t, and on judges or missile defense, Democrats won’t be. Instead, Bush will have to argue aggressively for his position, stir public support, and pick off selected Democrats. Let Daschle order a filibuster. The public won’t be pleased by blatant obstructionism. And most Americans want the country defended against missile attacks and prefer judges who favor tough law enforcement. Health care issues are another matter. There’s no built-in public majority for Bush’s conservative approach, so he may have to deal with Daschle on these. The Democratic takeover unloosed several canards about Jeffords’s motives and what lies ahead for Bush. Trent Lott, outgoing Senate majority leader, was faulted for not paying enough attention to moderates. Thus, Jeffords supposedly felt marginalized. Lott was asked how long he’d been talking to Jeffords. “Twenty-seven years,” he said. He and Jeffords were both elected to the House in the early ’70s and the Senate in 1988. In recent years, says Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Lott has given Jeffords more attention than any other senator. “He’s never courted conservatives that way,” says Santorum, a Lott ally. And Lott blocked repeated efforts by conservative senators to oust Jeffords from his committee chairmanship. He made sure conservatives never punished Jeffords in any way for voting with Democrats. Vague White House threats might have contributed to Jeffords’s decision. But mostly, it was the circumstance: a 50-50 Senate and a chance to make history. The irony of the switch is that Jeffords had more influence as a dissenting Republican than he’s likely to have as a conforming Democrat. More than any senator, he’s responsible for forcing Bush to reduce his tax cut by $300 billion. He was the major force behind making the child tax credit “refundable.” In other words, it goes to people who didn’t pay income taxes and aren’t getting a refund. It’s welfare. Jeffords didn’t negotiate the education compromise, but his presence spurred it. “He’s had a lot more success [in influencing the Senate] as a Republican member than any liberal Democrat has,” Santorum insists. What Bush couldn’t accept was Jeffords’s demand to increase spending for education of the disabled by 15 times more than Bush had proposed. Democrats won’t be able to swallow this either. They didn’t when they controlled the Senate and the White House. Another myth is that the agenda in Washington now changes. No, what changes is the schedule. Daschle plans to bring up a patients’ bill of rights as the first order of business when he becomes majority leader. Lott was going to bring it up, too, only later this year. Still, control of the schedule is very important. Lott demonstrated this when he ordered a vote, on the day Jeffords announced he was jumping ship, to confirm Ted Olson as solicitor general. Daschle chose not to mount a filibuster or even noisy opposition as the first act of the coming Democratic majority. Olson was confirmed, 51-47. If Daschle had been officially in charge, he could have delayed the Olson nomination indefinitely. There’s a final issue that Jeffords’s switch highlighted. Both the press and Democrats fault Bush for governing solely from the right. He’s not. Just look at education, the environment, hiring quotas, the war on poverty, and trade with China. But the stereotype exists, and Jeffords’s departure buttresses it. Democrats say Bush lost the popular vote and lacks a mandate, but is trying to impose a conservative program. Jeffords took up the he’s-too-conservative cry. The danger here is that Bush, fearing reelection trouble, could overreact and veer to the left. Only a minor, leftward adjustment is needed. And Jeffords didn’t change that. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
