Extremism in Defense of Moderation is No Vice.

The moderate Republicans are likable and often right. Why aren't they more influential?

A MODERATE REPUBLICAN CHAMPIONING early childcare can feel a little lonely sometimes. In late March, Vermont's Republican senator, James Jeffords, passionately addressed the Senate committee on Health, Education, Welfare, and Pensions which, as chairman, he had convened to discuss the state of childcare in the United States: "There is no question that America lags far behind all other industrialized nations in the treatment and provision of early education and childcare for preschool-aged children" His Democratic colleagues responded in kind. Liberal senator Paul Wellstone described the lack of childcare as "the one really huge indictment I can make of politics in America today."

Sen. Jeffords listened carefully to the expert testimony, occasionally nodding slowly and leaning to his left to whisper to Ted Kennedy, the committee's ranking Democrat. Jeffords couldn't have leaned to his right because the ranking Republican member, New Hampshire's Judd Gregg, was AWOL. According to a member of his staff, the Granite-State Senator "had office meetings with people from the University of New Hampshire." The next most senior Republican, Tennessean Bill Frist, wasn't there either. Neither was Tim Hutchinson, the Arkansas senator and Bob Jones University graduate who earned a 100 percent conservative voting record last year from The National Journal. In fact, the entire GOP side of the table was empty.

But Jeffords is used to being alone. He has broken with the Republican leadership repeatedly over his 25 years in office, from his solitary advocacy of Clinton's health-care proposal in 1993 to his early opposition to George W. Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut. Representing a liberal state that sends a Socialist to Congress every two years, Jeffords often seems closer to Kennedy than to Hutchinson.

Although both chambers of Congress are closely divided, the Republican leadership in the House, led by Texan Tom DeLay, has proved amazingly adept at getting its ducks in line and moving conservative bills through with assembly-line efficiency. But the founding fathers designed the Senate as a place for debate, and even Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the hyper-efficient majority leader who often irons his shirts after his drycleaners return them, hasn't managed to completely overhaul it. In this environment, and with a 5050 split, Jeffords could be a kingmaker, particularly teaming up with the three moderate New England GOP colleagues he eats lunch with every Wednesday-Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine.

Fiscally conservative, socially tolerant, moderately internationalist, generally pro-environment, tough on crime, and hungry for good government, the Mod Squad, as they like to call themselves, has the power to reshape the agenda in Washington. Chafee and Jeffords showed great courage recently by braving Dick Cheney's blandishments, and tempering the president's gigantic tax cut, batting the $1.6 trillion price tag down to $1.2 trillion in the Senate's temporary budget outline. But history has given the moderates the opportunity to do even more. Working with Democrats and other Republican senators with centrist instincts, the four New England moderates could build potent legislation from the center out and overhaul our childcare policies and much more for the good of our country. The question is whether they'll rise to the challenge.

The Center Cannot Hold

Moderate Republicans have had an impressive pedigree, reaching back to the party's founding by anti-slavery activists in the 1850s. Teddy Roosevelt clashed so strongly with the Party's old guard that he split off and founded his own Bull Moose movement. Henry Cabot Lodge, paterfamilias of a great New England aristocratic dynasty, didn't slide along with party leadership in the 1920s when he saw the oil industry reaching its hands into the White House; he helped crack open the Teapot Dome scandal and nearly brought down his own party. Arthur Vandenberg broke with Republican isolationists, helping the United States engage internationally after World War II and pass the Marshall Plan. A whole team of Republican moderates helped push through the great civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and was indispensable in creating Medicare in 1965. In fact, on perhaps the three most critical American issues of the 20th century, conservative Republicans were dead wrong. They opposed the New Deal, preached isolation in World War II, and tried to block civil rights and racial integration. It took moderates to pull the party toward reason.

The moderates began to lose influence when Barry Goldwater trounced Nelson Rockefeller at the 1964 convention. Still, until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, moderates often had their hands on the steering wheel. Through the 1960s, a group of moderate Republicans known as the Ripon Society served as the party's liberal conscience, pushing Keynesian economics and urging racial reconciliation. The group survives today, but only in tatters. While the Federalist Society chooses our judiciary, the Ripon Society hasn't updated its Web page in six months.

Back then, the moderates had influence. Even Richard Nixon, never one to call himself a middle-of-the-roader, hired Daniel Patrick Moynihan as his domestic policy adviser and governed mostly from the center--setting wage and price controls, and supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and the creation of the EPA. But with Reagan's election, the Republicans took a hard right. Moderates, who always have come mostly from the Northeast and Midwest, were put in the back seat--and sometimes the trunk. The shift has been compounded by the gradual movement of population and economic power toward the more conservative Sunbelt; the growing political influence of evangelical Christians, who are essentially absent in New England; and the increasing partisanship of Congress, which has isolated moderates on both sides of the aisle.

Politics In My Blue Blood

But moderation isn't dead, and the four New Englanders make up its core in the Republican Party. Chafee, Jeffords, Snowe, and Collins have the most liberal voting records of Republican senators and they come from states won last year by John McCain in the primaries and Al Gore during the general election. Sometimes referred to as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) by surly comrades, the New Englanders take pride in their moderation: They campaign on it and their press offices boast of it. When The Washington Monthly contacted Jeffords' office, staffers immediately faxed over an article titled "Jeffords is Still Man in the Middle in Washington."

And there's truth to that. The son of a former Vermont chief justice, Jeffords was first elected to Congress in 1974. When the Reagan Revolution came he supported John Anderson and, although a delegate to the Republican convention, went fishing with his son for much of the proceedings before returning for the votes. But even that wasn't easy. According to one Vermont Republican who was there, "We almost had to literally beat him up to get him to finally vote for Reagan."

Jeffords was recently selected as the "least partisan" senator by the Washingtonian's annual survey of Capitol Hill staffers and, although he has a list of impressive degrees from Ivy League colleges, he has a folksy style that plays well in Vermont. A soft-spoken man, he trips on words, and appears to have built up an incredibly short enemies list for someone in his position. In his last election, Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay-rights organization in the country, endorsed both Jeffords and his Democratic opponent, the first openly-gay Senate candidate in history.

Snowe and Collins also have New England politics in their blood. Snowe replaced her first husband in the Maine state legislature when he died in a car accident, and she steadily moved up the ladder. She served in the state legislature for four years. Elected to Congress, she then served 16 years before winning a U.S. Senate seat. She's so entwined with politics that, while in the House, she married Maine's governor.

Collins comes from a tiny northern town called Caribou, where her mother was mayor and her father a state supreme court justice. Never married, she is known for a tireless work ethic and for staying up late and actually reading through bills. In 1999, she found and expunged an anonymously inserted 17-word clause in the budget kicking back $46 billion to the tobacco industry.

The politics of the two women are eerily similar: They voted together on virtually every single issue last year, and both have approval ratings of about 70 percent in Maine. Both are slightly more conservative than Jeffords, opposing gun control and supporting a few quirky conservative causes like allowing motorcyclists to ride without helmets. The difference between the two may lie in personality. Collins seems drawn to the cameras and has found herself placed on high-profile committees, taking on the Clintons and mail fraud, and winning glowing profiles in Sunday magazines across the country. The GOP also plucked her to respond to Clinton's 2000 State of the Union. Snowe is known for her dry wit and working behind the scenes, gaining positions on both the powerful finance and budget committees. The two are also very close to the president and supported him early in the campaign. Bush has returned the favor by granting them nicknames: Susan Collins is "Sweet Suzy"; Olympia Snowe is "the big O."

Chafee's roots run even deeper through the region than those of his Mod-Squad colleagues. The son of a famously moderate United States senator, he comes from one of Rhode Island's powerful "five families" who are descended from the state's original settlers, and the parallels with President Bush are strong. A prodigal son with a respected father spends a lot of his youth wandering--Chafee went to a horseshoeing school in Montana and worked on racetracks around the country and Canada--before coming home to take a stab at the family business of politics. Bush became governor of Texas; Chafee became mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island. Each made a splash, in large part by charming everyone they met, and then moved up to his father's job. Chafee was appointed to his father's seat in the Senate when his father died in 1999.

Chafee, however, seems to believe in moderation much more deeply than Bush. His predecessor as mayor of Warwick, a Democrat, had privatized the city's garbage workers, but Chafee helped a government employees' union win back the contract. "We kept the cost down and we got more letters from people happy about the service.... It used to be you dump the trash and you throw the barrel. You move fast," Chafee says, waving his arms for emphasis. "Our guys set them right side up" The moral: Government can work. Bush hired the CEO of Haliburton as his top aide. Chafee hired Deb Brayton, formerly the executive director of Rhode Island's largest soup kitchen.

Chafee greets every staffer when he arrives each Monday. He walks and talks graciously and slowly with a constant smile. He says that his role models are former Senators Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a temperamentally moderate man if otherwise conservative, and centrist liberal Democrat, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. Chafee's the son that any New England Republican mother could be proud of and a welcome addition to any Georgetown dinner party.

All Conviction

In fact, all the Republican moderates seem charming, and they have made a difference on a number of important issues. They recently derailed the administration's plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. They helped sustain Clinton's veto of a partial birth abortion ban. They always seem to smooth the sharpest edges of Republican budgets, and they made Clinton's welfare bill palatable by cutting out the more radical provisions (slashing Medicaid, for example) pushed in by Republican holy-warriors.

But for every moderate vote, there's one where they seem to turn away from their centrist values. Despite their views on abortion, all four senators voted to confirm John Ashcroft. Chafee wasn't in the Senate before 2000, but Jeffords, Snowe, and Collins also opposed a patients' "Bill of Rights" that would cover everyone in the country. The vote of any one could have put it through the Senate. Despite strong rhetoric in favor of prescription drug coverage, Jeffords and the two Mainers opposed including prescription drug coverage under Medicare in 2000. The Maine senators also have supported the Republican party on international issues few Mainers were keyed in on, such as blocking the nuclear test ban treaty.

The Senate impeachment trial is another example of The Mod Squad's conflicted performance. To their credit, and to much acclaim, all the New Englanders voted to acquit Clinton on every charge. But that was after the issue became moot and 67 votes clearly weren't going to materialize. Earlier in the process, when the stakes were higher and the margin unsure, the moderates sided with their party leadership, refusing to dismiss the trial and insisting that witnesses be called even though their sworn testimony was already on record.

According to Tom Andrews, who served in the House with Snowe and then ran against her for the Senate, "The way a moderate works is you go to leadership and say, I have to vote my way on bill A, but you can count on me on L, M, N, O, and P--then when the klieg lights are on, you denounce A" Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a liberal Democrat from West Virginia, puts it a little more forgivingly: "You just can't go over all the time. You have to be tactical, strategic, and save it for the times you really care."

Passionate Intensity

Fair enough; they are Republicans and will of course often side with their party. But, more important, the moderates have almost no influence over the GOP's overall direction. A small group of senators can't have what they want all of the time; but four moderate senators ought to have as much influence on the Party as Tom DeLay, one rabid Texas congressman--but they don't.

As chair of the education committee, for example, Jeffords should be a force in the Republican caucus. But the Bush administration has started to use Judd Gregg as its prime channel on the major upcoming education bills, and Jeffords seems increasingly isolated from the committee. His call to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, for example, has not been answered by his party. The empty row of Republican chairs at Jeffords' childcare hearings is an indictment of the Republican Party; but it's partly an indictment of Jeffords too.

In fact, most legislation in Congress over the past six years has moved from the right inwards. Sharp-elbowed conservatives write it up, and then the moderates temper it a bit, restoring some money to the Earned Income Tax Credit or federal student loans for example. They take a little from the Democrats and a little bit from the Republicans, and they react. At best, as with Jeffords and Chafee's stand against Bush's tax cuts, they've served as adequate rear-guard protection.

But even on tax cuts, for example, the moderates could do much more. Olympia Snowe sits on the evenly divided finance and budget Committees and could move the party well away from a proposal she should know is fiscally irresponsible; but she has shown little inclination or ability to use her power. Collins and Snowe have merely proposed a "trigger" that would void tax cuts if the rosy projected surpluses don't materialize--a limp proposal given the ease with which Congress has circumvented such restrictions before. Besides Congress could also just cut taxes a bit now and then do it again if the projected surpluses do materialize. In any event, the trigger idea quickly ran out of gas.

To their immense credit, Chafee and Jeffords, along with Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, did indeed sink the administration's early hopes of ramming the cuts through without negotiation by opposing a nonbinding budget outline. But Snowe and Collins voted against their fellow Mod Squaders, and Bush will still get between $1.2 trillion and $1.6 trillion when the final votes come late this summer. He also knows that, if precedent holds, he should be able to win the moderates' support. In 1999, Jeffords and the two Maine senators supported a moderate $500 million tax cut written by centrists and designed to smooth out some of the inequities in the hard-line Republicans' $792 million proposal. But when Trent Lott killed the moderate proposal, they all signed the big one. Mysteriously, subsidies to Vermont maple-sugar farmers and fishermen, an important Maine constituency, sneaked in at the last minute.

Things Fall Apart

Strong moderate leadership from the Senate is particularly important as the House has become more conservatively partisan. There, as veteran moderate Jim Leach of Iowa says, "The center has collapsed" GOP representatives such as Sherman Boehlert of New York, Michael Castle of Delaware, and Connie Morella of Maryland all frequently cross party lines, and Christopher Shays of Connecticut has stared down his leaders on campaign finance reform for years. But the House moderates have been sinking since Newt Gingrich rapped his gavel down for the first time six years ago and Tom DeLay became majority whip. As the saying goes, Democrats like to govern and Republicans like to win. And the conservative House Republican leaders have recently proved very good at winning. Much of the most important legislation of the past few years has been driven through on nearly straight party-line votes, from Clinton's impeachment to the Bush budget.

But the Senate has always been where the House's coffee cools. In the House, the majority party has almost complete control over what legislation is introduced and how it is debated. In the Senate, individual members are much more free to introduce amendments to bills and it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. With this increased freedom, Republican moderates in the Senate make up a potential critical mass. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania joined Chafee and Jeffords in voting against the gigantic tax cut, and two other Midwesterners, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois and George Voinovich of Ohio, expressed at least some reservations. Mike DeWine, also of Ohio, has a reputation for coming up with original solutions on adoption and foster care issues. Ted Stevens of Alaska and Richard Lugar of Indiana have moderate streaks, supported campaign finance reform, and have decades-long histories of bipartisanship. Tennessean Fred Thompson joined them on campaign finance reform and has pushed creative and bipartisan solutions to solving our Social Security problems. John McCain, of course, commands his own constantly evolving army down whatever roads he pleases.

That's not enough senators to control the agenda. But the moderates have far more national appeal than the far right wing, and the president can't claim to have an overwhelming mandate that requires senatorial submission without having even won a plurality of the popular vote. But the Senate works with arm-twisting and deal-making in back corners and, to gain power, the moderates will have to prove first that they won't buckle, and second that they can build legislative coalitions outwards. As McCain has shown, one strong-willed senator can move mountains; but without that steel will, you can't really accomplish much--which is why it's not encouraging that, according to Chafee, the moderates don't exactly plan how to set the world on fire when they meet for lunch each Wednesday: "We don't do a whole lot of wonkish policy formulation. It's more keeping our friendships and we stay in touch as the issues move forward"

The core problem is that the moderate Republicans are either not strongly enough moderate, like McCain, or just not strong enough to change the party's agenda. Collins, because of her brashness, is often considered the most likely of them to catalyze a coalition with powerful centrist Democrats, and she is frequently compared to Margaret Chase Smith, another feisty women from Maine. But even Collins seems a little too entrenched in the party to organize a group backing up original ideas. Smith, after all, made her name as a first-term senator by becoming the first Republican to directly challenge Joe McCarthy in her famous "declaration of conscience" Collins made hers by rolling along with the leadership on its largely, partisan, and ultimately muddled, attack on Clinton's fundraising.

Even without one strong leader, the Mod Squad still has the potential to dramatically change the party's direction. The best model perhaps is the Progressive-era Republicans in the first third of the century such as Bob LaFollette, George Norris, and Fiorello LaGuardia. They fought to create the income tax, regulate the railroads, and provide economic support for farmers. They were a small minority in the Republican Party, but they never stopped clamoring for change: constantly giving speeches, publishing their own newspapers, and throwing their monkey wrenches in the party's gear. They deserve credit for passing a fair amount of legislation and also for planting the flag on many other issues that came to fruition under FDR, including the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which Norris had been advocating for more than a decade.

At its current rate, the Mod Squad seems unlikely to mimic the progressives. And that's too bad. Newt Gingrich, the heir to Goldwater and Reagan, was cast on the pyre by his party and by a public that gave him approval ratings in the single digits. The moderate George W. Bush who spoke of compassion and bipartisanship was elected president, not the jaggedly conservative BushCheney morph who now seems to be running the White House. A majority of Americans identify themselves as moderate and the average American agrees more with Jim Jeffords than with Judd Gregg, Tim Hutchinson, or the other Republicans who played hooky during childcare hearings.

In fact, in the 2000 elections, all the moderate Republicans won their seats by resounding margins while moderate Democrats defeated more conservative Republicans, from Spencer Abraham to John Ashcroft to Slade Gorton. But as the country waits, and the compassionate-conservative president drops the compassion, the best Republican moderates don't even seem to want to talk politics at lunch.