From Jefferson to Jeffords

My Declaration of Independence
by James M. Jeffords
Simon & Schuster, 136 pp., $14.95

ANY SERIOUS STUDENT of the Bible has, at one point or another, had to grapple with the Moses Paradox. The Moses Paradox is the proposition that Moses was the humblest man in all the earth, information that would go down easier had it not come to us by way of Numbers, a book written by Moses.

A similar puzzlement sets in when reading "My Declaration of Independence," the self-aggrandizing manifesto from Vermont's newly Independent senator, Jim Jeffords. Like its author, it manages to be preachy, charmless, and slight. Even with the frontispiece, double-spacing, pocket format, and full reprint of the May 2001 speech in which Jeffords untethered himself from the Republican party, it weighs in at a skeletal 136 pages (though it feels much longer).

Jeffords's publisher, Simon & Schuster, threatens a full-length autobiography next year. But why bother? In "My Declaration of Independence," Jeffords has already accomplished his mission: showcasing his wholesome goodness on every page, casting himself in a morality pageant that plays like every Jimmy Stewart movie and Quaker Oats commercial rolled into one. "A contemporary 'Profiles in Courage,'" boasts his jacket copy. "A soft-spoken, modest, true American hero," announces the book's press release. "There seems to be a hunger in our country for heroes, especially of the political variety," writes Jeffords of himself. It's worth noting that Jeffords's publication date was bumped because of the World Trade Center attacks. Now that Americans have a pretty fair snapshot of what actual heroes look like, his claims read more like blasphemy than hyperbole.

THEN THERE'S the title. Jeffords has no compunction about pinching the name of our founding document for his modest little memoir. By doing so, he might single-handedly settle one of the perennial debates of historians: Which has grown smaller, the times or the men who inhabit them?

Our forefathers, when crafting the prequel to Jeffords's book, were combating "death, desolation and tyranny...cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous age." Jeffords was fighting to downsize the Bush tax cut and to boost special-education funding--that is, before he got all upset when Republicans retaliated by threatening to end Vermont's price-supported dairy cartel and the White House didn't invite him to a teacher-of-the-year reception. Thomas Jefferson fought for life and liberty. Jim Jeffords fought to drink punch in the Rose Garden and to sell overpriced milk.

But if there is a yawning chasm between Jeffords's reality and reality's reality, most seem not to have noticed. The truest thing Jeffords writes is that before he decided to end Republican rule of the Senate by becoming an Independent and caucusing with the Democrats, which effectively made him one, he "ranked about ninety-ninth on the U.S. Senate celebrity scale." A Nexis search of Jeffords's name shows that he has garnered almost as many mentions since last May's melodrama as he had in his prior twenty-five-year career (this, despite being a member of the Singing Senators).

From the moment he first whinnied over George W. Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut--one that couldn't have come as a surprise to Jeffords, since Bush campaigned on it--the media lavished praise on Jeezum Jim (Jeffords's nickname, and one Vermonters insist is a farmer's swear word). He was extolled by the New York Times and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. The man who had never been on a Sunday talk show was suddenly the subject of fawning profiles in People magazine. For a while, "aw-shucks" and "plainspoken" became the two most overworked modifiers in the English language.

Not that Jeffords was influenced by the media attention that had eluded him his entire career. "Those who don't know me may have thought I . . . enjoyed the limelight. Nothing could be further from the truth," he says in "My Declaration of Independence." Nor was he influenced by Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, who, among others, offered him the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works committee if Jeffords defected (at the same time Jeffords's chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor, Pensions Committee was set to lapse).