Republicans have clearly settled on the party line regarding Jim Jeffords: his defection had nothing to do with ideology. Rather, he saw that Strom Thurmond might not make it much longer and he wanted to be the one to put the Dems over the top, with all the fanfare and preferment that would decision would entail.

For my part, I never thought the ideological and self-interest theories of Jeffords’ defection were mutually exclusive. It makes sense to me that his motives were a mix of the two, that they flowed together.

But that aside, the Republicans’ argument amounts to an admission which has yet to receive much attention.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume Jeffords’ move was entirely mercenary and self-serving.

If there were any real prospect of the Republicans winning back the Senate in 2002 then Jeffords’ switch would make little sense. He’d just be trading a few months as a quasi-Democrat committee chair with no real chance of passing legislation for a return to minority status in eighteen months, and the prospect of mega-payback when the Republicans retook control.

Even if Thurmond did pass on to his great reward before 2002 the same logic would apply.

On the other hand, if the Democrats seemed likely to expand their majority in 2002, and again in 2004, then Jeffords’ hop would make a lot of sense on self-serving grounds.

In other words, the Republicans’ attack on Jeffords betrays their own unstated belief that time is not on their side.

Here’s President Bush today at Sequoia National Park — text from White House press release:

My administration will adopt a new spirit of respect and cooperation, because, in the end, that is the better way to protect the environment we all share — a new environmentalism for the 21st century. Citizens and private groups play a crucial role. Just as we share an ethic of stewardship, we must share in the work of stewardship. Our challenge is to work in partnership. We must protect the claims of nature while also protecting the legal rights of property owners. We will succeed not by antagonizing one another, but by inviting all to play a part in the solutions we seek.

Here’s Newt Gringrich six years ago introducing the House Republicans’ environmental Vision Statement (a “new environmentalism . . . for the 21st Century”) — text copy is from “House GOP Releases Environmental Plans”, UPI, May 15th, 1996:

This document is the foundation of the new environmentalism, which will define the environmental agenda for the 21st century,” Gingrich said. Some of the “principles” of the one-page vision statement include: –“Americans should be assured that their air and water is clean and safe, that they will have access to outdoor public recreation areas, and that our historic and wilderness areas will be protected. –“Regulations should improve the environment by setting common sense standards without dictating the precise technologies for meeting those standards. The development and use of innovative technologies should be encouraged. –“Federal policy should, where appropriate, be based on incentives for individuals, state and local governments, and businesses to protect the environment, rather than setting down inflexible laws,” and, –“Private property owners should be assured greater certainty regarding the use of their property.”

And Gingrich a month later — text copy from The White House Bulletin, June 18th, 1996:

[W]hat we’re offering is a new environmentalism that has private-property rights and has economic opportunity; but it also has better science, more creativity, more community involvement, more local initiative so that we really are doing a better job of having a better environment for our children and grandchildren.

Need I say more?

Long-established political systems often have informal rules and traditions as persistent and important as the formal ones. So, for instance, in the British mixed-monarchy of the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a tradition of animosity and mistrust between the King and the Prince of Wales. This stemmed from the fact that the heir-apparent often had to live well into adulthood or middle-age before assuming the job he had been groomed for — and those opposed to the present regime would often cluster around him as an avenue to future power and preferment.

(The movie The Madness of King George plays somewhat on this tendency.)

In the United States there is a similar tradition in which the president’s brother must be a ne’er-do-well buffoon who episodically gets into scrapes and embarrasses his more successful sibling but also — and this is the kicker — humanizes him. (In apparent recognition of Hillary Clinton’s assumption of certain formal political duties, her brother Hugh Rodham also took on the role of presidential oaf-brother.)

But George W. Bush’s brothers are all either successful or WASPish enough to keep their shenanigans private and proper. So the chore has apparently fallen on his daughters, particularly the rapscallion Jenna.

As all the wires are reporting today, Jenna and her sister Barbara were picked up for trying to buy booze with a fake ID at Chuy’s Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas. This comes, of course, less than a month after Jenna pled no contest to alcohol possession, after she was picked up in sweep of nightclubs by the city police. And that after seemingly innumerable appearances on the front page of the National Enquirer.

Now one thing this obviously shows is that Jenna really, really knows how to party. And, trust me, that’s a virtue (or a vice, take your pick) that Talking Points can really appreciate.

But isn’t this sort of getting to the point where it goes beyond the rule that you can’t talk about the chief executive’s progeny? I mean, you’re the president’s daughter and you try to buy alcohol with a fake ID?

Excuse me?

Isn’t this sort of a nine strikes and you’re out kind of situation?

Be sure to read this important tidbit on the Bush administration’s decision to cut by fifty percent funding for combating child labor around the world — a key part, no, a sine qua non, of what progressive free traders like Talking Points believe in. It’s neither as funny nor as saucy as the post below about the rapscallion Jenna Bush, but it’s a good deal more important.

The big news next week will be the British Labour Party’s landslide victory over the
Tories (aka, the Conservative Party)
on June 7th.

This will be big news on a number of levels: First, in roughly eighty years
as one of Britain’s two major parties, Labour has never won two consecutive
elections. Or, to put this in American terms, a Labour Prime Minister has never
been reelected. Labour is also expected to substantially expand it’s already
massive majority in the House of Commons.

But the real story here isn’t so much Labour’s power as the complete and
utter collapse of the Tories — arguably the most successful small-“d”
democratic political party of the twentieth century.

This poll
out today shows the first possible bad news for Labour in some time. Their
level of support has dipped to 43% — the lowest yet. But even this unexpected
late slide for Labour (likely a blip actually, earlier in the week they were
surging) underscores the pitiful position of the Tories — since Labour seems to
be losing votes not to them, but rather to the Liberal Democrats, the long-time puny third
party of British politics.

And it’s not like things are exactly hunky dorry in the UK. Last year the
country experienced a mini-energy crisis, recent months have been spent trying
to stamp out a horrific epidemic of foot and mouth disease, and the last week
has seen the worst race riots since the early 1980s. On top of all that, Tony
Blair and his second in command John
Prescott have had some rough
moments on the campaign trail.

So it’s not so much that Labour — or ‘New Labour’ as the Blairites style
themselves — are so strong or on top of things, though they are, but rather
that the Tories have all but ceased to exist as a political force.

At mid-week, Tory leader William Hague
was reduced to the pitiful necessity of arguing that a Labour landslide “would
be extremely dangerous for this country.” In other words, Hague had been
forced to begging the voters for a crushing defeat rather than a
humiliating one.

In any case, what’s interesting from an American perspective is that the
Blairites are very close to the Clintonites in terms of ideology, political
style and strategy, and on a personal level as well. Clinton advisors give
advice to the Labour folks and vice versa. So, with all this, why has the
Third-Way model (embraced by Blair and Clinton) seemed to succeed so famously in
the UK while remaining at best stagnated and incomplete in the United States? Or
to put it in more concrete terms, why is Tony Blair going to spend the next five
years in 10 Downing Street while Al
Gore is … well, just where is that guy?

P.S. CORRECTION: As a one-time professional historian (who even did work in
English and British history) I am loathe to admit an historical error, but here
I must. My point above, that Labour has never won successive elections is broadly
true, but technically inaccurate. Labour won power in 1945,
won an election in 1950, but then lost in 1951. They won narrowly in 1964,
expanded their majority in another election in 1966, but then lost in 1970.
Labour won two elections in 1974, but lost power in 1979. Here’s the story:
British governments can call elections at more or less any time they choose
within five years of a parliamentary election. In each period of power Labour
has either needed two quick successive elections to form a stable government,
or, as in 1950-51, won a second election narrowly, proved unable to gover! n
effectively and had to call another election, which it lost. What would be
accurate to say is that Labour has never been able to govern for two successive,
full parliaments. On the other hand, in the post-war era the Tories have twice
managed this, once governing for three consecutive parliaments (’51, ’55, and
’59) and more recently for four (’79,’83,’87,’92). Thanks to an attentive TPM
reader for noting my error.

Overshadowed by the furor of the Jeffords defection last week was
the surprising news that John
McCain was one of only two Republicans to vote against the final Bush tax
cut. (The other was Lincoln
Chafee.)

From the perspective of last year’s primary campaign this shouldn’t have been
surprising: McCain’s opposition to the Bush plan was a major part of his
message. But McCain seemed pretty on-board with the tax cut until fairly late in
the game. And voting against the final bill has a particular import: It was
going to pass anyway; it was a free vote. So voting against was not meant
to affect the outcome, but to send a signal.

This very
interesting article in Saturday’s Washington Post says that McCain is
seriously considering leaving the GOP to become an Independent – not simply to
fiddle with the Senate calculus, but with a view toward a possible Independent
run against Bush in 2004. The authors also delve into McCain’s discussions with
Democratic Senators Daschle, Kennedy and Edwards about a possible party switch,
Daschle’s
trip to McCain’s Arizona homestead this weekend, and McCain’s meetings with
various New Democrat policy types.

All of which again raises the recurring question: just what sort of pol is
John McCain these days? The best language the Post’s Edsall and Milbank
have for him is to call him the head of the “embattled progressive wing of the
Republican party.” And that’s well enough since that’s about all our current
political vocabulary allows. But is John McCain really like Jim Jeffords and
Linc Chafee?

They may come down similarly on a series of policy questions. But the basic
difference is clear even if it’s difficult to articulate. The best way to
describe it may be to says that there’s something ‘soft’ about the
Jeffords-Chafee sort of moderate Republicanism, something ‘hard’ about McCain’s.

So if McCain were to leave the Republicans and try to head up some sort of
third force in American politics, or try to run for president on that basis,
what exactly would that politics be? Especially considering that McCain’s policy
positions now seem very, very similar to those of the centrist-progressive wing
of the Democratic party?

Part of what’s going on here isn’t so much about public policy or political
strategy, as it’s a matter of political gestalt. And political
gestalt, or perhaps better to say the unifying principle of a politics, is often
much more important than the particular shopping list of policy positions a pol
endorses.

Clintonism, as it evolved over the course of the nineties, was rooted in a
politics of empathy. Wags made endless cracks about that line “I feel your
pain.” But that was an important line – and what was behind it was key to Bill
Clinton’s immense power and resiliency as president.

There’s a question that pollsters always ask voters when sizing up their
views about a given politician. The question is generally phrased something like
this: does politician X care about and/or understand the kind of problems
someone like you faces in their daily life. A pollster would put it more
artfully, but you get the idea.

Bill Clinton always scored very well on this question. Even when he did
pitifully on personal approval. Do you respect him? Is he honest? Etc. And that
was the key to his political strength – something Republicans never quite
grasped. The question measures the politics of empathy. And Clinton had it in
spades.

Clinton transformed the presidency and the nation’s politics along these
lines. Some of the theater of this was in the ubiquitous presidential rope lines
and the flying in to commune with disaster victims. But on a broader
programmatic level he crafted a politics of feeling and empathy, one which was
about crafting policies – small ones, usually – to address the mundane needs
people faced in their daily lives. This was a sort of retail politics which, as
Jacob
Weisberg once noted, amounted to a governorization of the presidency. Your
parents can’t pay for their prescription drugs? We’ve got a program. Kids’ class
sizes are too big. We’ve got a program for that too. Need to learn how to run
some new machine to get a new job? We’ll hook you up!

This change goes far past Bill Clinton and now saturates almost all of our
politics. Republicans and Democrats alike have to play this game. One need only
look at the rhetoric of our new president, if not his actions, to see the deep
impress of Clintonism.

In any case, when Bill Kristol and
Company started casting about for something they called National Greatness
Conservatism I suspect one of the things motivating them was the recognition
that conservatives could simply never beat Democrats at this game. If the
politics of empathy is a house, it’s floorboards tilt Democratic. Republicans
are never going to out-feel Democrats or be able to offer up more programs.
Compassionate Conservatism really just amounts to ‘I kinda feel your pain.’

What was necessary was not so much a different raft of policies, as a
different operating principle. And the logical conservative response to a
politics of empathy and feeling would be a politics of sacrifice, austerity,
assertion and perhaps also virility and masculinity. In many ways, that’s just
what National Greatness Conservatism is. It particularly explains the emphasis
on assertive foreign policy, military might, and national service.

Now, having said all this, McCain and the National Greatness folks both
started their journeys separately before meeting up and deciding that they might
be going to the same place. And one can start out moving in a political
direction for one reason and then get pulled in by other political gravities
along the way. That seems to have happened to both McCain and the Kristol crowd, though in
somewhat different ways.

So McCain may look similar to the Democrats on policy after policy. And
increasingly he is. But this difference of mentality or gestalt is just as much
what’s in play here as where McCain comes down on the patients’ bill of rights.

With the vandalism story turning so clearly against
them, the White House has now decided to strike back.

According to this
story in the Washington Post, someone at the White House went around
late last week collecting “recollections of officials and career government
employees” and wrote up a list on Friday. (This was in response to queries from
the Post.)

A few points seem worth making. Presumably this is the maximal argument,
considering that this is the best news-cycle moment for the White House to turn
the tide on the story. Even at that, it’s pretty weak stuff. And at the
risk of stating the obvious, none of this is any more substantiated than it was
before. Ari Fleischer has a list. None of the people who saw the stuff have come
forward to make the claims and answer questions. With the exception of two
snapshots of the White House counsel’s office which the Post said showed
the place with “lot of trash but no discernible damage,” they have produced
no evidence.

In fact most of the accusations are worded in a broad and inflammatory
fashion — but in a way that is quite short of specifics.

There was “obscene graffiti in six offices.” Well, just what did it say? Are
they talking about the Office of Strategery signs?

Or what about the “Pornographic or obscene greetings … left on 15 telephone
lines”? Just what did they say? Were these just harmless jokes? Like the stuff
the Bushies left for the Clinton’s eight years earlier? Or things that were
actually nasty or obscene?

Many of the accusations seem at least as easy to explain in terms of
disorganization and confusion as intentional mischief. Fleischer reported that
75 phone lines were tampered with. But this meant “having the number plates
removed and the lines plugged into the wrong wall outlet.”

What we have here are accusations and, truthfully, most are either vague to
the point of meaningless or just too pitiful to even mention. In this latter
category you’d have to include the mention of the “two historic doorknobs [that]
were missing.”

(Note To Mike Allen: did Ari say that line about the historic doorknobs with
a straight face? Did you ask for any more details? Is this “doorknob-gate” now?
Or, given that it centers on Fleischer, maybe just knob-gate?)

For my part, nothing in the Post article changes the essential facts
or merits of the case. It only shows Fleischer and company’s willingness to
compound the original slander. “We tried to be gracious, but the last
administration would not take graciousness,” Fleischer told the Post.

Fleischer’s explanation for why they didn’t tell any of this to folks at the
GAO also sounds fishy:

Bernard L. Ungar, the agency’s director of physical infrastructure
issues, said in an interview that White House officials had told him some items
“had to be repaired, such as telephones and computer keyboards, but that there
was no record of damages.”

Fleischer said the agency had only “asked us if we had anything in writing to
provide.”

“The answer is ‘no’ because we did not keep track in writing — consciously
so, because the president wanted to look forward and not look backward,”
Fleischer said.

Leaving aside Fleischer’s again-repeated, risible claim that was trying to
tamp down the story, not elevate it, here’s what we know: an administration
which campaigned on and flaunted its conspicuous honesty started its term in
office with a orchestrated campaign of lies. His press secretary (and numerous
White House officials and Republican operatives) started his administration job
off by deceiving the admittedly credulous White House press corps and
participating in an orchestrated campaign to slander his predecessors.

An administration which campaigned on and flaunted its conspicuous honesty
started its term in office with a orchestrated campaign of lies.

Coming from Ari Fleischer a mere list of accusations just won’t cut it.

You can find the Talking Points’ run down on
the Washington Post White House vandalism story below. But another
question. The White House keeps talking about this “list” it’s released
— which apparently formed the basis of the Post story.

Here’s my question: does only the Post get to see the list? Isn’t it
going to be released to the rest of the media, so we can actually see it and
evaluate it?

And the snapshot of the trash-strewn office in the White House counsel’s
office? Can’t we see that? News reports at the time said folks at the White
House were “informally documenting” (in the words of CNN’s Kelly Wallace) what
happened. And Drudge, for what’s is worth, was told by someone at the White
House that “photographic and audio evidence” was being compiled.

Can we see those pictures?

More to come tomorrow on this extremely interesting New
York Times OpEd piece by
Georgia Senator Zell Miller.

Nothing like finishing up with a bang, they say.

Yesterday Anthony Nelson, a Treasury minister in John Major’s government and
an MP for twenty-odd years (1974-1997) announced he was defecting to
Labour. Certainly not a crushing thing in itself, but it doesn’t exactly set
the right mood heading into election day.

Today Marney Swan, chairman of the Conservative Women’s National Council, the
Conservative Party’s women’s
organization, said William Hague had blown it
with the women’s vote with his combative anti-Europe campaign stance. She also
said she’d be calling for an inquiry after the election to find out how things
got so screwed up.

Meanwhile in a perhaps necessary, but still
humiliating and pathetic ruse, William Hague has announced a detailed
20-point action plan for his (mythical) first two weeks as Prime Minister,
including his plan to halve the number of ‘spin doctors’ in the government.

‘Spin doctors’ being the party hacks who pen bamboozling speeches and action
plans that have no relation whatsoever to reality.