A One-Man Earthquake

Whe

n Senator Jim Jeffords bolted from the Republican Party last week, throwing control of the Senate to the Democrats and reprogramming the Capitol power grid, it took almost no time for the first signs of the new order to appear. There was White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez cooling his heels outside the Senate chamber until Democrat Patrick Leahy, now the presumptive chairman of the Judiciary Committee, could spare a moment to meet with him. There was the business lobbying group known as Arctic Power, quietly canceling a 10-state, $500,000 radio ad blitz designed to sell Memorial Day motorists on President Bush's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. There were the two dozen tripods set up a full hour before Tom Daschle made his first march down the Capitol steps as Senate majority leader--a striking change from the single C-SPAN camera that used to cover his news conferences. And finally, there was Senator Don Nickles gazing at the sign saying ASSISTANT MAJORITY LEADER that will no longer greet him when he enters his office each day. "I like that sign," he said ruefully.

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A Senator's decision to leave his party is a small tectonic shift, but in the fragile geology of an evenly divided Senate, Jeffords' decision shook the ground, rattled the windows, wrecked the walls and tossed the furniture. What made the shift worse was that it happened in the middle of what was supposed to have been George W. Bush's most triumphant week since the Inauguration. His signature tax cut was set to clear Congress, and his other big agenda item, education reform, passed the House. Republicans expected to go home to their Memorial Day parades basking in the first great accomplishments of the Bush era.

Then the ground buckled. Was it a one-man earthquake or an electoral aftershock? Having lost the popular vote and pulled the closest of victories from the rubble of Florida, Bush built his high-rise presidency dangerously close to the fault line. He governed as though he had a mandate, muscled his agenda through Congress by picking off a few conservative Democrats and ignoring the rest, and punished those who defied him. He could get away with it because all the lawmaking horsepower was in Republican control, and it seemed to be working for him--until Jeffords tore his high-rise down. Now, Daschle told TIME, the balance of power is "probably more in keeping with what the American people intended."

A new TIME/CNN poll suggests he may be right: 45% of those polled believe the country will be better off with the Senate in Democratic hands, while 36% prefer Republican control, and 19% aren't sure. But this balancing act may also be a formula for gridlock, with each side able to block the other but neither able to push its priorities. If no one budges, "we're all losers," Daschle said.

How did this happen? Bush was determined not to make his father's fatal mistake of neglecting the conservative Republican base. Instead, he may have repeated the near fatal one Bill Clinton made in his first two years in office. Having run as a centrist who could forge a new bipartisan middle, Bush--like Clinton--started governing in a way that seemed rather to cater to his party's extreme. Where Clinton had gays in the military and Hillarycare, Bush had Arctic drilling, global warming, a Vice President who scoffs at conservation and a hard-right Attorney General, John Ashcroft. As Jeffords announced his decision to become an independent, the Senator who traces his family's Republican roots back to the days of Lincoln said, "Looking ahead, I see more and more instances where I will disagree with the President on very fundamental issues--the issues of choice, the direction of the judiciary, tax and spending decisions, missile defense, energy and the environment and a host of other issues, large and small."

What forced Clinton back to the center, of course, was the landslide 1994 election that turned both houses of Congress over to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years. He resculpted his presidency in the image of his campaign, working budget deals with the Republicans, passing welfare reform with them, leaving his party behind when it wouldn't come along.

Now that Bush has suffered a one-man version of 1994, some moderate politicians are hoping he will make a similar mid-course correction. But for now at least, the Bush White House rejects the comparison and promises no changes. This was no national referendum, Administration officials say, just one wobbly liberal who decided to walk off the end of the pier--perhaps, they suggest, to salvage a chairmanship he was slated to lose in 18 months under Senate rules. "This is a guy who said he found it impossible to support an agenda that the President has spent two years talking about," says Bush strategist Karl Rove. And it is true that on the issue that Jeffords cares most about--education--Bush has moved to the left, cutting deals with Ted Kennedy and abandoning vouchers. White House communications director Karen Hughes says Jeffords "was quite comfortable remaining in the Republican Party when the leaders talked about abolishing the Department of Education, but he's not comfortable with a President committed to education."