HuffPo's Ryan Grim:
Congressional Democrats need to stand up for themselves when they disagree with President Obama, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said on Thursday evening. She was reflecting on the demise of her executive compensation provision, a move that allowed AIG to pay its top executives $165 million in bonuses.
Snowe, who co-authored the amendment with Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, knows a thing or two about standing up to her party. She was one of three senators to break with the GOP to back Obama's stimulus and has routinely crossed party lines, drawing the ire of her fellow Republicans and former President Bush.
She's right. And Grim's right to report it.
But remember this: Snowe set herself up as one of the ultimate kingmakers in this stimulus deal, and for a week solid, the world waited with bated breath to find out whether we were gonna get a bill to pull us out of this death spiral or not, and we were reminded daily that it just wasn't going to happen without the nods of a very narrow and select group of "moderates."
If Snowe disagreed with the change, we certainly didn't hear about it at the time.
I have no doubt that she did disagree. And no doubt that she ought to be heard when she says Congressional Dems need to stand up for themselves. She and I have certainly delivered similar messages before.
But a few weeks ago, the sun apparently couldn't rise without Olympia Snowe's say-so.
Now, for someone with so much power, nobody wears it in lower-key fashion than she does. She's certainly no Evan Bayh. Not only is she considerably more reserved, but she actually sometimes has the power we're led to believe she does.
And I appreciate her vote, especially when she has to defy her party to provide it.
But in the current climate, where observations like this one (though accurate) can appear to pin very specific kinds of blame on very specific targets, it's worth remembering that if she herself had a key provision in the bill that she wanted to go to the mat for, she probably could have gotten her way.
UNLESS... there are more names to be named about whose "yea" vote would have disappeared if her provision had stayed in.