This gives a little advantage to those who don't know Jim Jeffords, because some of us do not trust his motives. If he is trying to cast himself as an Emersonian individualist, he fails.
Individualists care naught for tradition, they care for their conscience.
Anyone who has served as a Republican congressman and then senator for 27 years has had plenty of time to get the swing of things under the GOP banner. True, under President Clinton, Jeffords voted 75 percent of the time on the Clinton side of divided issues. But that long endurance as a member of the Republican party would have given him, one assumes, time enough to discover irreconcilable institutional differences some time before May 24, 2001. His followers tell us that he is not a trivial man. Therefore we must rule out the failure of the White House to invite him to tea when a fellow Vermonter got an award as the catalytic agent of his disaffection.