The Man Behind The Quake

The Washington press corps had been fantasizing about a big story: John McCain would get fed up with George W. Bush, switch parties and shift control of the Senate to the Democrats. But reality was more interesting than media dreams. It took an unassuming Vermont Republican to crystallize the argument that Bush isn’t quite the charming centrist he promised to be. That the point was driven home by such a spotlight-averse Senator made his message all the more dramatic.

Jim Jeffords, as it happens, is the anti-McCain. Until last week, he was known as mild, stolid, devoid of oratorical flair. His anguished speech in Burlington announcing his switch was probably the most dramatic and revealing of his career. Despite his membership in the Singing Senators, he can be remarkably tone deaf. In 1994 he threw himself behind Clinton’s doomed health-care plan, declaring with a thudding lack of prophecy, “I am pleased to be the first. I am absolutely confident I will not be the last.” He can be unpredictable. In 1979 he and his wife Elizabeth, with whom he has two children, were divorced. But they later remarried.

All of which may help explain why the defiantly nonconformist Jeffords, who attended Yale undergrad and Harvard Law School, is the most popular politician in his defiantly nonconformist state. Progressive yet frugal, he embodies the principled pragmatism of Vermont public servants like his father, who was chief justice of the state supreme court. At last week’s press conference, Jeffords invoked local heroes like George Aiken, a onetime Republican Senator who vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, famously arguing in 1966 that the U.S. should just declare victory and leave.

But Jeffords faces a far different electorate than his predecessor did. Once among the most solidly Republican states in the country, Vermont over the past 40 years has absorbed an influx of liberal urban exiles. Today more of the state’s 600,000 residents are registered as independent than as Democrat or Republican. The state’s lone Representative in Congress, Bernie Sanders, is a self-described socialist. Indeed, Vermont’s shift to the left, as much as the national G.O.P.’s shift to the right, helps explain why Jeffords made the jump.

While he does not face re-election until 2006 and won his race last year 3 to 1, Jeffords knows that most of his constituents find Bush’s tax cut fiscally irresponsible and his policies on the environment downright alarming. After the Senator’s announcement, most Vermonters cheered the conversion. “For such a shy, taciturn person to make such a momentous move…it just gives me goose bumps,” says Jeanne Keller, a consultant to grass-roots groups.

State Republican Party members felt a tad less jubilant. In addition to a sense of betrayal, felt by those who donated to and worked for his campaign, Republicans are worried that Jeffords may have made a tactical blunder for the state. “Whatever legislation he wants to get passed now will either be blocked in the House or be vetoed by the President,” says Vermont G.O.P. chair Patrick Garahan. “Where’s the advantage in that?” Republicans like Garahan hope that Jeffords’ politics are like his marriage and that in a few years he’ll find his way back.

–By Michele Orecklin. Reported by William Dowell/Burlington