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PoliticsOL.com Editorial - Week of May 27, 2001
Hell Hath No Fury Like a Senator Scorned
In the 1980 presidential race, President Jimmy Carter mistakenly referred to former president Gerald Ford's home town, Grand Rapids, as Cedar Rapids. Ford, campaigning for Ronald Reagan, said that Carter, "apparently... didn't even know that Michigan was one of the forty-eight states", for that brief moment forgetting about Alaska and Hawaii.
President George W. Bush seems to be governing as though there are only thirty states, the ones whose electoral votes he won last year. A continuance of such a policy is a recipe for disaster for Republicans. It took forty-six years for the Republicans to gain concurrent control of the White House, Senate and the House. That advantage has now been neutralized in just four months.
Last week, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont -- a moderate Republican -- announced that he will leave the GOP, become an independent and caucus with the Democrats, thus giving the Democrats a 50-49-1 plurality and -- with Jeffords' vote to organize the Senate -- control of the upper house for the first time since 1994.
This need not have been the case. But, top White House advisers and some conservative in Congress decided that an example needed to be made of Jeffords because of his opposition to some of the administration's legislative agenda. As a result, they interfered with Jeffords' chairmanship of the Senate Health, Education & Labor and Pensions Committee, left him off the invitation list for a White House reception honoring a Vermont teacher and threatened to cut off vital dairy price supports to farmers in Vermont and other New England states.
The latter was the final straw. Even though some Vermont newspapers were reporting last weekend that Jeffords might switch parties, the White House blew any last-ditch appeal by several more days of inaction before inviting him to meet with the President and Vice President. By then, it was too late.
Some conservatives, such as soon-to-be Minority Leader Trent Lott recognize the mistakes that were made in dealing with the GOP moderates. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, whose voting record is more liberal than Jeffords, has been given a high Senate leadership position. After Sen. John McCain of Arizona issued a stinging rebuke of the treatment towards Jeffords, he was invited to dinner at the White House last Thursday.
However, in many other conservative quarters, the attitude towards Jeffords is "good riddance." Top White House aides continue to suggest that Jeffords' switch was motivated solely by the promise of a committee chairmanship by Democrats. Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma was quoted in the London Times (yes, news of this has crossed the Atlantic) as saying the GOP offered to put Jeffords in a leading leadership position, then added, "We comtemplated King of the Senate but we don't have that position yet."
What the "self-appointed enforcers of party loyalty", as McCain called them, fail to realize is that if Senators Jeffords, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island towed the rigid party-line as often as Nickles and the White House preferred, they'd be replaced by their state's voters in their next election by Democratic clones of Patrick Leahy, George Mitchell and Jack Reed.
In 2000 Republican Senate incumbents lost elections in Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Washington. The former senators -- William Roth, Spencer Abraham, Rod Grams, John Ashcroft and Slade Gorton -- were all to the right of the mainstream views in their respective states... and all were replaced by moderate or liberal Democrats.
In 2002, there will be 20 Senate seats currently held by Republicans up for grabs, compared to only 13 Democratic-held seats. Conservatives Wayne Allard of Colorado and Bob Smith of New Hampshire can expect to face strong, well-funded challengers. The Republicans can ill-afford to make their more moderate members -- Collins, Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Gordon Smith of Oregon and Ted Stevens of Alaska -- vunerable by forcing them to take positions that will surely alienate large portions of their respective electorates.
George Bush owes his presidential victory as much, if not more, to the ineptitude of the Gore campaign and Clinton fatigue as he does to the 48% of the electorate who voted for him. He should not mistake his razor-thin victory as a Reaganesque landslide and clear mandate.
The Republican Party is at a crossroads. It can either learn to accommodate broader views and dissent on some issues within its ranks or it can prepare to relegate itself to a minority party in Congress for perhaps the next fifty years.
Election Map Not As Conservative As Conservatives Think
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