As I wrote in the Hill earlier this week:
The overall trend is unmistakable — the GOP’s radical fringe has decided that its party’s establishment are ideological apostates and is systematically purging them. And while the primary season is now over this cycle, there’s at least one Republican who has to be rethinking her party allegiance just about now: Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.
Snowe faces reelection in 2012, and her genuinely moderate credentials — while popular with her state’s overall electorate — are proving electoral poison within her own party. Pollsters at Public Policy Polling tested her viability in early September and found Republican voters in her state want a more conservative alternative by a 63-29 margin.
Snowe is no idiot. She realizes she's on thin ice.
It doesn't stand to reason that the Republican Party would want to exclude moderate Republicans if they want to be a majority party. Those are mutually exclusive propositions," Snowe said.
At times, as the Maine Republican talked about this issue, she became exasperated.
"Ideological purity at 100 percent is a utopian world and I don't know who lives in utopia. I've never lived in utopia," said Snowe.
I asked about the argument her GOP colleague Sen. Jim DeMint made to me a day earlier in his office, that Americans no longer want what he called "mushy" lawmakers in the middle.
"What works in South Carolina and Delaware may not work in Maine. We all have different views. We're independent," Snowe responded, "I can't go back to the people of my state and say, excuse me, I have to be one hundred percent ideologically pure because someone has dictated that from another state. It just wouldn't wash," she said.
She can be as exasperated as she wants, Jim DeMint and the teabaggers don't care. The only question will be what she does about it. Does she go down with the ship, because there's no way she survives a Republican primary, or does she leave the GOP and live to fight another day as an Independent or Democrat?
If it was up to me, she'd stay a Republican. That way, her own party could get rid of her and we'd get a real Maine Democrat in the seat. But I don't make that call. It'll be up to her to decide whether she wants to win reelection or not, and she won't be able to do it as a Republican.
