My Declaration of Independence by James M. Jeffords Simon & Schuster, 136 pp., $14.95 ANY SERIOUS STUDENT of the Bible has, at one point or another, had to grapple with the Moses Paradox. The Moses Paradox is the proposition that Moses was the humblest man in all the earth, information that would go down easier had it not come to us by way of Numbers, a book written by Moses. A similar puzzlement sets in when reading “My Declaration of Independence,” the self-aggrandizing manifesto from Vermont’s newly Independent senator, Jim Jeffords. Like its author, it manages to be preachy, charmless, and slight. Even with the frontispiece, double-spacing, pocket format, and full reprint of the May 2001 speech in which Jeffords untethered himself from the Republican party, it weighs in at a skeletal 136 pages (though it feels much longer). Jeffords’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, threatens a full-length autobiography next year. But why bother? In “My Declaration of Independence,” Jeffords has already accomplished his mission: showcasing his wholesome goodness on every page, casting himself in a morality pageant that plays like every Jimmy Stewart movie and Quaker Oats commercial rolled into one. “A contemporary ‘Profiles in Courage,'” boasts his jacket copy. “A soft-spoken, modest, true American hero,” announces the book’s press release. “There seems to be a hunger in our country for heroes, especially of the political variety,” writes Jeffords of himself. It’s worth noting that Jeffords’s publication date was bumped because of the World Trade Center attacks. Now that Americans have a pretty fair snapshot of what actual heroes look like, his claims read more like blasphemy than hyperbole. THEN THERE’S the title. Jeffords has no compunction about pinching the name of our founding document for his modest little memoir. By doing so, he might single-handedly settle one of the perennial debates of historians: Which has grown smaller, the times or the men who inhabit them? Our forefathers, when crafting the prequel to Jeffords’s book, were combating “death, desolation and tyranny…cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous age.” Jeffords was fighting to downsize the Bush tax cut and to boost special-education funding–that is, before he got all upset when Republicans retaliated by threatening to end Vermont’s price-supported dairy cartel and the White House didn’t invite him to a teacher-of-the-year reception. Thomas Jefferson fought for life and liberty. Jim Jeffords fought to drink punch in the Rose Garden and to sell overpriced milk. But if there is a yawning chasm between Jeffords’s reality and reality’s reality, most seem not to have noticed. The truest thing Jeffords writes is that before he decided to end Republican rule of the Senate by becoming an Independent and caucusing with the Democrats, which effectively made him one, he “ranked about ninety-ninth on the U.S. Senate celebrity scale.” A Nexis search of Jeffords’s name shows that he has garnered almost as many mentions since last May’s melodrama as he had in his prior twenty-five-year career (this, despite being a member of the Singing Senators). From the moment he first whinnied over George W. Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax cut–one that couldn’t have come as a surprise to Jeffords, since Bush campaigned on it–the media lavished praise on Jeezum Jim (Jeffords’s nickname, and one Vermonters insist is a farmer’s swear word). He was extolled by the New York Times and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. The man who had never been on a Sunday talk show was suddenly the subject of fawning profiles in People magazine. For a while, “aw-shucks” and “plainspoken” became the two most overworked modifiers in the English language. Not that Jeffords was influenced by the media attention that had eluded him his entire career. “Those who don’t know me may have thought I . . . enjoyed the limelight. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says in “My Declaration of Independence.” Nor was he influenced by Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, who, among others, offered him the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works committee if Jeffords defected (at the same time Jeffords’s chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor, Pensions Committee was set to lapse). No, for Jeezum, the entire episode was a great big Texas death match with his conscience. It brooked no honest political dissent between men of good conscience, since Jeffords, in his telling, is the only person who had one. It was a conscience newly pricked by the awareness that the Republicans surrounding it were all voting as if they were, well, Republicans. It was the conscience of a moderate who had slept soundly through what most would consider more conservative chapters in our history, the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions. And it was a conscience that had permitted its owner to write in Roll Call, just three months before he bolted, “In my quarter century in Washington, I have never seen a president invest as much personal interest and political capital in education”–the very issue that Jeffords now claims he fled over, since Bush wouldn’t give Jeffords a $180 billion increase for special education before it was reformed. THE BULK of “My Declaration of Independence” is a near pornographic recounting of the lead-up to Jeffords’s defection. There are the come-to-Jesus meetings with the Republican leadership in which he rebuffed every compromise they offered; and entreaties to stay Republican from his staff and his wife, herself so liberal she supported a Jesse Jackson presidency. Jeffords records every rhetorical hiccup, most of which would put a discriminating audience straight to sleep with wind-ups such as: “As I put it in the text of a speech to the Burlington Rotary Club in October 1999 . . .” But above all else, Jeffords’s intent is making sure you feel his sacrifice. He fancies himself a damn-the-torpedoes kind of guy, writing, “In the end, I had to be true to what I thought was right, and leave the consequences to sort themselves out.” Those consequences have sorted themselves out just fine for Jeffords. Sure, there were the petty snubs from his old cronies in the Singing Senators. Trent Lott, for example, claimed Jeffords was such a poor singer that they frequently turned off his mike (having to sing “Elvira” with Lott would be enough to make any man reconsider his affiliations). And of late, several media organs, from the New Republic to the Boston Globe, have rudely noticed that the two biggest issues that purportedly set Jeffords and his conscience a’walking–Republican failure to fully fund the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, and failure to renew the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact–have flamed out, with hardly a moo from Jeffords’s new friends across the aisle (when Jeffords voted against Bush’s education reform bill, only six Democrats joined him). Other than that, however, it’s been a gentle ride. As Larry King told the formerly media-shy Jeffords, “I salute you, Jim.” Though Jeffords had to admit to Katie Couric that “in a way” his education stand was for naught, he bounced back by the time he was on “60 Minutes,” telling Mike Wallace, “I’ve never felt better about myself.” And why shouldn’t he? After all, as he told Katie, “I’m chair of an important committee.” The Associated Press calls his book a “vitally important document.” Sixty-five percent of the Green Mountaineers and civil unionists back home support his decision, so much so that they named a beer after him. He is represented by the chairman of the William Morris Agency. He has a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster. And Sharon Stone said she would love to shake his hand. (After they met, Jeffords wouldn’t disclose to the Washington Post whether Stone was blubbering, though he did allow, “I was moved to hear her praise for me.”) Of all this adulation, Jeffords writes, “This will soon pass.” Not soon enough. But Jeffords does have one thing right. The American people are starved for evidence that politics is “not so corrupt as they believe,” that there is such a thing as a politician who “will act on principle,” even if such a stand puts him in peril. If Senator Jeffords meets someone who fits that description, he ought to write a book about him. Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
