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  he
conservative press is throwing a hissy fit over Jim Jeffords….
[T]he level of vitriol is such that the soft-spoken
67-year-old
is being treated like Saddam Hussein," writes media critic
Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. This is perhaps not
the sort of rhetoric one ought to use when suggesting that other
writers are guilty of hyperbole and hostility. Most conservatives
we know have had mixed reactions to Jeffords's departure from the
Republican party: on the one hand, regret that his move gives liberals
more power in the Senate; on the other hand, recognition that Jeffords
didn't really fit well in the GOP and hope that there are some silver
linings to the new configuration of power.
Some partisan
anger is only natural in these situations. Liberal journalists weren't
exactly the voice of sweet reason in responding to Ralph Nader's
campaign last year. But we suspect that a lot of the anger among
conservatives has less to do with the brute fact of Jeffords's leaving
than with the patent phoniness of his explanation for it.
Jeffords suddenly
discovered that he was in a conservative party? Yesterday, Jeffords
said that one reason he had to leave was that he was going to have
more and more conflicts with President Bush. That didn't stop him
from being a Republican under President Reagan, with whom he disagreed
more often than he agreed.
Supposedly
the top issue that gave him discomfort with Republicans was education:
Too many of them measure success, he said, by how many kids they
can get out of public schools. (That's a caricature of the conservative
position of course, but when it comes to getting kids out of rotten
schools into ones that teach them and keep them safe we'll plead
guilty.) Jeffords said this during the same week that the House
passed a bipartisan education bill containing no vouchers with 384
votes and President Bush's blessing. Yet Jeffords, who didn't leave
the Republican party when its platform pledged to abolish the department
of education, can no longer abide by conservative extremism? His
cover story is impossible to square with his timing.
That timing
makes Jeffords's switch seem either petty or self-interested. It
doesn't shock the conscience when a politician does something self-interested
or dresses up that self-interest in piety. But we will confess to
a little annoyance when the establishment press treats such a politician
as some kind of statesman. Both the New York Times and the
Washington Post ran editorials taking Jeffords's self-presentation
with the utmost seriousness.
The Post
says that Jeffords's "short but powerful" lecture is full
of lessons for Republicans. Contrast this coverage with that accorded
to Sen. Richard Shelby when he left the Democrats for the Republicans
after the 1994 election. Shelby got less coverage because he didn't
cause control of the Senate to flip but what coverage he got was
rationally cynical. The Post ran no editorial and the Times
ran one titled, "Profiles in Opportunism." Shelby was
treated fairly. Jeffords is being made into something more than
he is.
That said,
conservatives shouldn't — and haven't — let their anger at Jeffords
and the press go unchecked. The reason is not that their anger is
unwarranted but that it is unproductive. Serious, politically active
conservatives will spend their time figuring out how to advance
their agenda in the new circumstances — and, more important, how
to change those circumstances in 2002. Don't get mad. Get organized.
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