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- The Guardian,
- Saturday May 26 2001
As with recent British politicians who have crossed the floor - Emma Nicholson, Alan Howarth, Shaun Woodward - there were the usual attempts by former colleagues to attribute the defection to careerism or mental imbalance. And it did initially seem worrying that the White House's failure to invite Jeffords to a garden party had contributed to his hostility. But Jeffords is not easily smeared. The failure to invite the senator from Vermont, a long-time expert on education, to an event at which one of his constituents was to be declared Teacher of the Year suggests a deep and deliberate insult which backfired.
The obvious objection to what Jeffords did is that no single senator should have the power to reassign the country's legislative direction and leave the president politically impotent. But the Vermont veto was only possible because of the results of an election which split America almost equally on ideological lines. In its four months in office, the White House seemed to take the Churchill line that one vote is enough but, while not acting illegally, President Bush was acting immorally in behaving as if he had a mandate for radical rightwing action. This week's events spotlight a weakness already apparent in his presidency: a tendency to behave as if he has more power than is in fact the case. This may result psychologically from his dynastic swagger: the sense of being born to the White House.
Politicians with tiny majorities - and Bush's very presence in office remains questionable - should not seek to govern as if their ideas have convinced the population. To those who object that the Vermont majority asked Jeffords to serve for six years as a Republican, he could equally reply that his voters did not envisage him being the casting vote for nastinesses such as massive tax cuts and an anti-abortion supreme court.
It's a risk of close elections that they can give exaggerated influence to idiots. Because of his shrinking majority, John Major spent his second term in office at the mercy of rightwing dingbats. The country was effectively being run by politicians who would never have been trusted by the public with the job. Obscure Ulster politicians were able to ransom James Callaghan's administration. But places in the US Senate are rather harder won than those in the House of Commons and there are fewer space-fillers. Senator Jeffords can legitimately claim to be a conscientious objector who has acted to prevent a president pushing through measures for which no clear public will exists.
Although the presidential and parliamentary systems are very different, there are two lessons for Britain in the revolution in the Senate. One is to offer international confirmation of the impression already given here by the apparent failure to shift the opinion polls of William Hague's campaigns against immigration and European integration. Among both the ruling and the voting classes in Britain and America, the support for radical conservatism is thinning. President Bush's policies are now tarnished as ideas which a decent conservative would not morally accept. And William Hague has suffered the rare humiliation of seeing his political model humbled in the middle of a campaign based on the hero's ideas.
The other way in which the Jeffords affair reflects on British politics, however, brings no comfort to those of any ideological stripe. The depowering of the president is merely an unusually dramatic illustration of the checks and balances which are so central to the American system. The price for ensuring that the leader does not abuse his power is that he sometimes seems to have no power at all. But, while America's most recent general election produced virtually a 50-50 split in the legislature, opinion polls here continue to suggest that Tony Blair may command anything up to 80% of the seats in the House of Commons.
Although the posited Labour majorities seem impossible in practice, it's clear that in the next parliament, a putative British Jeffords, with some moral objection to a Labour policy, would be irrelevant and ignored. The only checks and balances on Blair would be his conscience and an upper chamber which he has renovated to his own advantage.
It's likely now that a second Bush-Blair summit would bring together one of the least powerful presidents in history with one of the most powerful prime ministers ever. The only comfort is that the gods of politics have installed a controlling mechanism through the psychologies of those involved. Bush, who wants to change the world, doesn't have the votes. Blair, who has the votes, does not want to change the world.
comment@guardian.co.uk
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