who blogs at Dirigo Blue and Kennebec Blues
and has been misrepresented by Senator Olympia Snowe for many years.
Olympia Snowe has given us in Maine a great gift, that of an open Senate seat. While I join those her laud her service, the cause of her departure that she lays at the feet of an “atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” has featured her in recent years increasingly as a contributor to those very politics of polarization.
Certainly Senator Snowe has had sporadic moments of moderation but so many matters never made it onto the Senate floor for reasoned debate and up or down votes because she participated in the “my way or the highway’ politics with the Minority Leader McConnell and the Republican minority to extend filibusters and cast negative cloture votes time after time blocking legislation, nominations, and killing bills that would have passed with an absolute majority. For Senator Snowe, moderate talk has been cheap but moderate votes have been scarce.
Now we are faced with three immediate possibilities.
The first is a tea party capture of the Republican nomination that will present Maine with a stark choice of sending to the Senate the terrible political poison that we experience today that comes from the poor and crass governorship of Paul LePage. This unlikely tea party success would only export the rhetoric, scapegoating, and a far deeper dose of misrule and misrepresentation by a super-minority, line-in-the-sand, and stalemate supplying cabal of partisanship gridlock those who misguidedly believed in the Snowe moderate myth bemoan.
The second is the Republicans run someone without visible tea part roots. However, that individual will bow low before the ultra conservative altar and like the current GOP Presidential nominee seekers swing far right in rhetoric and action. Most terrible of all if successful in a general election, this person would deliver only continuity of gridlock that is nothing more than a second act of the moderate Maine Senator myth. Pray tell, who are the moderates left with any power in the Maine GOP? There are none.
The third possibility is the emergence of a powerful voice and message of committed representation of poor and middle class Maine citizens on the issues that truly affect their lives that could come out of the Democratic Party that would genuinely contribute to a change in discourse and subject that is sorely needed in Washington. We very much need a fighting voice on our side like that of Elizabeth Warren in her bid for the Senate seat in Massachusetts. I believe that person is out there and maybe even already in the race.
This open Senate seat is the greatest opportunity in a long time not just for Democrats but more vitally for the citizens of Maine to be represented as people with both critical needs and important aspirations for the future over political machinations blocking the general wellbeing of everyday citizens in craven and corrupt service of corporate interests and connected wealth.
It is time for Maine to speak truth to power. Your messages of encouragement and help are desired and most welcome. We want to win this open Senate seat and put it in the hands of serving Maine and the nation!