Northern Exposure
The GOP has won the South, but lost the North.

May 22, 2001 2:00 p.m.

xactly what finally prompted Sen. Jim Jeffords to leave the Republican party may never be known. It may have been something as trivial as resentment at the White House snub of not inviting him to a ceremony honoring a Vermonter in retaliation for his votes against cutting taxes. Or as self-interested as the desire to extort a good committee chairmanship from the Democrats in return for handing them a Senate majority.

What can be stated with confidence, however, is that he did not leave for the main reason he gave — namely, that the GOP was hostile to education in general and public schools in particular. As John Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out tartly in National Review Online, the Jeffords who remained in the GOP when it was pledged to abolish the Education Department left it in the very week that the House passed with 384 votes President Bush's education bill, containing no vouchers but billions for public schools.

No fictional sleuth or real-life cross-examining attorney would miss the hypocrisy here ("Are you seriously telling the court?"), but it seems to have passed by even the most investigative reporters. That may be because the mainstream media rather like the senator's cover story.

As the Washington Post noted editorially, his "short but powerful" lecture contained lessons for the GOP — that is, it fit neatly into the media's stereotype of the Bush GOP as ultraconservative and ruthlessly partisan under a cover of nice manners. Journalists duly reported this prejudice as "news analysis."

Whatever the immediate cause of the senator's floor-cross, however, its fundamental cause (to borrow the language we learned in History 101) was the drift of Yankee Republicans to the left. His own state, Vermont, led the way here. Though one of the two states that voted for Alf Landon in 1936, it switched to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and has been trending heavily Democratic ever since. Jeffords himself accommodated this trend by voting with the Democrats as often as with the GOP from Ronald Reagan onward. His defection merely legalized a longstanding common-law relationship.

For a long time, analysts explained Vermont's leftward drift as the result of immigration by post-hippie refugees from New York and other liberal enclaves. In fact, it was the harbinger of a much more profound political transformation — that of the two major parties changing places.

As early as the '60s, Kevin Phillips had predicted the gradual takeover of the South by the GOP in his classic The Emerging Republican Majority. But the more the GOP succeeded in the South, the more influence southern politicians had in the GOP. And that ran up against one of the great historical truths of American politics, what author Michael Lind has identified as the permanent hostility between the Yankee Republicans and the southern white heirs of the Plantocracy. As the GOP increasingly looked and sounded like a southern party, with leaders such as Trent Lott and Tom DeLay, so the northern tier of the United States from Maine to Washington state — the traditional heartland of Yankee Republicanism — began moving into the Democrat column.

Was this inevitable? Perhaps not. What helped it along was that the GOP, intent on capturing the South, concentrated on winning Christian evangelical votes with issues such as abortion, and suburban votes nationwide with tax cuts. It largely neglected the issues that northern Yankee Republicans traditionally cared about — fiscal prudence, environmentalism, immigration, and political reform.

The Democrats have flirted with some of these issues under the influence of their new supporters among disaffected Yankee Republicans. But they are not really convincing, either as fiscal conservatives or as opponents of Big Money in politics. And they have not yet won the trust or affection of Yankee voters.

One result is that the Republicans have managed to hold on to a number of highly marginal districts, such as Olympia Snowe's Senate seat in Maine and, until last week, Jim Jeffords's in Vermont, by being more liberal than the national GOP. The other — and perhaps more significant — result is that a large number of northern white voters feel mildly disenfranchised. In the last decade, they have auditioned various possible champions in primary and presidential elections — notably Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, John McCain, and Ralph Nader. None has proved entirely satisfactory, however, and, in addition, the two-party system has frustrated any third-party ambitions.

But McCain and Nader are still in the running — each seeking Yankee participation in a new political coalition, the former a centrist coalition, the latter a leftist one. President Bush is governing in a bold manner, yet from a slender political base. With the Senate now in their hands (and the media largely sympathetic to their cause), the Democrats have the ability to foster their own political issues. And whatever else happens, there is certain to be political crisis between now and 2004.

The game of political realignment is not over with the departure of Jeffords — indeed it has scarcely begun.

This originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.