The Meaning of Switcher Jim: Sense and nonsense in the Jeffords fallout.

It's the South Carolina primary and the John Ashcroft nomination rolled into one-with a dash of arsenic thrown in. It's an occasion for all the independent minds-namely, the media, Democrats, and GOP moderates-to make every argument possible for one grand proposition: that the Bush operation, and the Republican party generally, are just too right-wing. It's an occasion for Rick Berke of the New York Times to talk to all these independent minds and file a report: Dateline Washington-Everyone agrees, the Bush Republicans are just too right-wing. It's an event that will live on for months, if not years, as support for every hostile cliche about the GOP-it's the apotheosis of Jim Jeffords, patron saint of bipartisan toleration.

It used to be that it took a Willie Horton ad or an attack on Murphy Brown to get a Republican labeled as "intolerant" or "divisive." Now, it's just a matter of leaning on senators to try to pass a tax cut. It used to be that Republican "moderates" supposedly recoiled from conservative orthodoxy on abortion, but were fiscal conservatives. Now, it's fiscal conservatism itself that is driving them out of the party. The Jeffords jump, in short, provided an opportunity for media liberals and GOP moderates to nudge conservatism a bit further into disrespectability, and to try to knock Bush off his governing agenda. So, in the days after the switch, Bush's critics unloaded, selectively deploying the swear words of the Establishment, and a collection of arguments that are unfair, or contradictory, or both.

Take one of those swear words: "intolerant." A Washington Post editorial paraphrased Jeffords's farewell speech approvingly: "The [Republican] party had strayed . . . perhaps from tolerance most of all." Now, Republicans weren't destroying religious art or otherwise assaulting pluralism. What Jeffords and the Post were objecting to were the mundane operations of party discipline, the strong-arming that attends passing a president's program. Tom Daschle employed exactly the same tactics in opposing Bush. But no one called Daschle intolerant. In fact, Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote that he "is notoriously respectful of dissenters"-the very same day her newspaper reported that Daschle had lashed Montana senator Max Baucus for working to pass the president's tax cut.

Many of the commentators couldn't keep straight whether the Jeffords switch was motivated by the GOP's petty intolerance (as exemplified by his non-invitation to an event honoring a Vermont teacher) or by his high principle. The petty explanation had its advantages, because it would make the White House seem not just immature (needing to "grow up," as John McCain famously put it), but stupid. Commentators relished remarking just how shortsighted, how unsophisticated, how dim it was to play vindictive hardball in a 50-50 Senate. But if Jeffords really switched over something as picayune as a White House invitation (and one that wasn't extended to any other senator or congressman either), he obviously wouldn't deserve his saintly, above-the-fray reputation. Newsweek's dreary Jonathan Alter, for one, squared this circle by concluding that the Jeffords switch had been brewing over philosophical differences for two decades-but that the White House needed to "grow up" anyway.

Another line of criticism had it that Bush forced Jeffords out by lurching right after the election. But Bush's critics refuse to distinguish between swinging right and simply continuing to hold a conservative position. So, for instance, it is the fate of Bush's opposition to funding for abortion services overseas to be continually portrayed as a rightward lurch. Sen. Susan Collins said after the Jeffords jump, "The president struck exactly the right tone in the campaign. But some of his actions since then, restricting international family planning, don't send that message." One Jeffords aide compared the international cut-off to "a kick in the stomach," which implies that it was something swift and unexpected. Yet Bush had enunciated his opposition to such abortion-related funding by November 1999. Eighteen months later, though, it is still talked about as if it were something Bush hadn't thought or mentioned until that dark day in January when he decided to govern as a conservative.

A variant of this critique has it that, as a post-Jeffords report in Time put it, "many of Bush's most conservative agenda items were hidden away in the campaign's fine print and covered over by his big messages about moderation and helping the little guy." It's true that Bush had a compassion rap in the campaign, but he still has one today, and he has attempted to act on his chief "compassionate" agenda items, reforming urban schools and supporting faith-based charities. As for "many" of his conservative policies being "hidden away," they must have been hidden, like the purloined letter, in plain view. Bush gave major speeches outlining his tax, Social Security, and missile-defense ideas, and talked about them at almost every campaign stop. Where was Time magazine?

When Bush isn't attacked for lurching to the right, he is knocked for stubbornly persisting there. Complained Sen. Lincoln Chafee on the day of the Jeffords switch: "Hearing Karl Rove say the agenda is going to continue, they're not going to deviate, I think is giving us all pause." In this analysis, there's nothing wrong with changing positions, so long as it's a move to the left. Here's a classic ideological Catch 22-if the Bush administration has a conservative position on a given issue, it's wrong because it is either 1) a flip- flop, or 2) not a flip-flop. If the former, it's a sign that the politically flexible Bushies have made an unprincipled turn right to please conservatives; if the latter, it's a sign of a destructive ideological rigidity.

And whether the White House is flipping, flopping, or staying the same, it is said to be doing it arrogantly. McCainiac William Kristol, for example, interpreted the Jeffords jump as a sign that the White House could no longer "just smugly repeat canned talking points" and has "to get out and convince Americans of the merits of their policies." Yes, the Bushies have more than their share of Texas swagger. But to suggest that Jeffords bolted the party of smug talking points to the party of humble off-the-cuff candor is ridiculous. Besides, another school of Bush criticism faults the president precisely for going out to the country to explain his tax cut, as a way to peel off enough Democratic votes to pass it-which is, for some reason, considered a trespass on bipartisanship.

Indeed, the standard for bipartisanship, when it comes to Bush, is impossibly high. A Chafee spokesman complained in Jeffords's wake that "so far, unfortunately, all indications point to a continued effort to push what can only be termed a divisive agenda." Well, yes. In this context, "divisive" is almost meaningless. If wanting to cut taxes $1.6 trillion is divisive, why isn't opposing such a cut divisive as well? If Bush's agenda is divisive, so is Tom Daschle's-as is, by definition, any agenda that doesn't command unanimity. But, of course, positions can be divisive in different ways. Bush's education bill was mostly divisive on the right-more House Democrats voted for the bill than Republicans. The education bill, then, escaped getting the label. The tax cut, however, is "divisive" because it's something Democrats disproportionately opposed.

Bush partly brought this criticism on himself. His talk in the campaign of changing the tone in Washington played to an impatience with political argument itself. Of course, Bush meant something much less sweeping than an end to all political disagreement, just that it would be conducted in a civil manner. But the press has unreasonably interpreted his campaign rhetoric as a guarantee of perpetual comity. This makes it easy for Democrats to frustrate Bush-the mere act of disagreeing with his agenda renders that agenda a betrayal of bipartisanship. Insofar as the Jeffords jump weakens Bush and makes it harder for him to pass his program, it can therefore be (perversely) celebrated as step toward the bipartisan nirvana he talked about in the campaign. As Time put it, "Thanks to a stern, quiet man named Jeffords, Bush may finally have the opportunity to create the kind of Washington he promised last fall."

In other words, it is only through failure that Bush can succeed. This is the rub. All the various criticisms of Bush are meant to keep him from enacting his agenda. For Democrats and much of the media, this is considered a good in itself. But it has a subsidiary political benefit as well. They want to make Bush into his father by forcing him to abandon his substantive campaign promises. Thus, Bush will be a failure on his own terms, and lose one of his foremost strengths in the bargain-his reputation as a straight shooter, as someone who keeps his promises. In Newsweek, Howard Fineman made this explicit: "Ironically, [Bush] now must dig back into his own family roots, mimicking the dealmaking, compromising career of his own Yankee father." Fineman concludes: "In other words, by acting more like his father Bush may win the second term his father never could."

What is more likely (and less counterintuitive) is that by acting like his father, W. will end up like his father-which may, after all, be the only way to please his post-Jeffords critics.