Jeffords comes home.(The Providence Journal)

No senator should be stranded in his own party. James Jeffords of Vermont is, for all intents and purposes, a liberal Democrat, and he has now made it official by joining the Democratic caucus in the Senate. This puts him in closer accord with the sentiments of voters in his home state, and it gives the Republican leadership one less apostate to worry about. No doubt, Mr. Jeffords will be happier in the company of Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, and the two Barbaras, Mikulski and Boxer. He has come home.

But let us not pretend that Mr. Jeffords is a "moderate," whatever that may mean. He is a liberal who used to be a Republican and is now an independent _ who, for all practical purposes, is a Democrat.

"Moderate" is a handy term, largely invented by the press, to distinguish between conservatives and everyone else on Capitol Hill. Does this constitute bias? Of course it does. It is interesting to note that, so far as the media are concerned, the Democratic side of the aisle is composed almost exclusively of "moderates" with, perhaps, one or two progressive firebrands _ Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts _ still preaching the old-time religion. On the Republican side, however, the situation is reversed: The GOP is almost exclusively in the clutches of right-wing extremists, it is said, with a handful of "moderate" exceptions.

If you believe this, you may also think that James Jeffords betrayed his longtime colleagues on the basis of principle. And maybe he did. But how do we explain the difference in perception between Mr. Jeffords's abandonment of the Republican Party and Democratic losses to the GOP?

The last time a U.S. senator switched parties was in 1995, and the senator in question was Richard Shelby, of Alabama. Mr. Shelby, a lifelong Democrat, explained that the Democratic Party had moved so far leftward from its historic moorings that he could no longer, in conscience, officially associate himself with it. He had tended to vote with the Republicans on major issues, and most of his fellow Alabamians were comfortable with his conservative views. He, like James Jeffords, had come home, and, like Senator Jeffords, was presented with a leadership post by grateful new colleagues.

Yet Mr. Shelby's reward was to be the subject of a scathing editorial in The New York Times entitled "Profile in Opportunism." No such words, needless to say, have been hurled at James Jeffords.

Still, let us not confuse the action of Mr. Jeffords with a gesture of conscience. When Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon quit the Republican caucus in 1953 _ the Eisenhower administration, he explained, was too conservative! _ he, too, tipped the balance of a closely divided Senate. But because the voters of Oregon had elected a ...