Olympia Snowe and the war inside the GOP

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is by now a well-known US Senator and moderate. She has a long and distinguished career in politics, beginning in the Maine State House in 1974, the State Senate, then the US House of Representatives from 1979 - 1995, then being elected to the US Senate in 1995 where she has served since. Snowe has never faced a serious electoral challenge. Her track record for election to the Senate have showed an increased win margin with every election. In 2006 she crushed her Democratic opponent Jean Hay Bright with a landslide 74% of the popular vote. Her electoral coalition rivals those of former Sen. Ted Kennedy and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

She is also an ever-present Senator, with an enviable voting record, missing no votes whatsoever in 1996 - 1997, 1999, 2001 - 2005, and 2006 - 2007, and has so far missed no votes in 2009. In the other years she has been in office, except 1991, she has only missed a handful of votes, only one in several. Snowe is the most bipartisan member of the Senate, voting with her party only 59% of the time, and in 2009 has gone sharply to the left, voting against her party 99 times. Snowe also outstrips anyone in the House, which is much more sharply partisan for its larger size. Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID) is the most bipartisan Congressman, voting with Democrats 67.4% of the time.

Snowe is also considered a liberal, in spite of her stalwart insistence that she is a Republican and would "never consider" moving to the Democratic party. Interest group ratings are telling. In 2008, the American Conservative Union rated Snowe a paltry 12%, as did the Club For Growth (which recently endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in NY, and conservative Republican Marco Rubio in FL) and the Christian Coalition gives Snowe only a 20% rating. Overall these are consistent drops in approval from conservative interest groups, although CFG did rate her at only 9% in 2006. According to the National Journal, Snowe's overall composite conservative score floats in the high 40's to low 50's, buffeted upwards by a few fiscal and military positions that are more in line with conservatives. Conversely, the following liberal-leaning and business-related groups have rated Snowe at 100%: Environment America, American Wind Energy Association, American Wilderness Coalition, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Children's Health Fund, American Association of University Women, Partnership For the Homeless, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Information Technology Industry Council, National Youth Advocacy Coalition, Alliance For Retired Americans, Utility Workers Union, AFL-CIO, and the National Breast Cancer Coalition. She also consistently scores above 80% with Human Rights Campaign and the NAACP. Religious interest groups are split on Snowe, with most mainstream Catholic and Christian groups generally approving of her, while many Muslim-affiliated groups find her distasteful. Snowe scores poorly with watchdog groups concerned with government spending and taxation, but most entrepreneurship and small business groups nearly worship her. Snowe supports several key issues which are traditionally considered Democratic territory. She is pro-abortion, supports gay marriage. Her conservative credits come from a pro-death penalty stance, strong advocacy for the war on drugs, and a record of fiscal and military hawkism. She strongly supported the Bush Administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, although she has crossed the aisle many times to support progressive fiscal initiatives and opposed the Bush tax cuts of 2003. Snowe is a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership and supports stem cell research. She is also a member of Republicans for Environmental Protection, the Republican Majority for Choice, Republicans for Choice and The Wish List (Women In the Senate and House), a group of pro-choice Republican women.

On April 28th, 2009 the GOP was rocked by the bombshell of Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic party. Most GOP heavyweights downplayed the event, giving a collective "good riddance" attitude toward Specter, who also ranks with Snowe, Susan Collins and Ben Nelson as the most moderate lawmakers  in Congress. Only Snowe had anything meaningful to say, and did so in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled, "We Didn't Have To Lose Arlen Specter." While the title seems to imply Snowe would like to see Specter return to the GOP fold, the content of the editorial criticizes the GOP for falling under undue influence of Conservatives, and exhorts the party faithful to be more open to and inclusive of diverse political views. Snowe said, "There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash... We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand. Rather, we should view an expansion of diversity within the party as a triumph that will broaden our appeal."

Snowe is the antithesis of the Tea Party movement, someone inside the GOP who disagrees with Conservatives, and they are uniting against her. Public Policy Polling (PPP) released a poll on Nov. 10th, 2009 indicating that the majority of the Republican party in the state of Maine is now against her. According to the poll, only 29% of conservatives say they would support Snowe for re-election, and only 31% of likely Republican voters overall. Moderate Republicans, Independents and Democrats however, have a dramatically different opinion. 64% of self-identified moderate Republicans would still support Snowe, while 60% of Democrats indicate a positive feeling toward her, who are joined by 51% of independents, bringing Snowe's net positives in the state overall to 51%. While those numbers indicate Snowe could still win a state-wide popular election, it means trouble for her in the primaries where 59% of polled Republicans say they would support a more conservative Republican.

This is a growing problem for moderates cross-party. It could safely be said at this point that Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries because she was seen as too moderate, and he was able to broker himself as the more liberal option, although all analysis' indicate the two are nearly identical ideologically. In the GOP, Specter was the first in a snowball effect of moderates being pushed out of party favor. Next, we saw Dede Scozzafava's campaign for the House completely destroyed by Conservatives who abandoned the GOP altogether and endorsed a 3rd party candidate to disastrous result; the Democrat won. And now, Conservatives in Florida are mounting a campaign against Republican Governor Charlie Crist who is running for the US Senate, supporting fellow Republican Marco Rubio as the "more conservative" option. The backlash for Democrats is now that an "ultra-liberal" (latte liberal) coalition has gotten elected, they are held accountable for everything that has or could go wrong, and moderates in the Democratic party are in danger of being overwhelmed by more conservative Republican opponents in the upcoming mid-terms, forcing them to oppose their own party in order to maintain their own careers. And, conversely, Republicans are facing accusations of "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) and worse if they do not slide to the right and support conservative ideals and opposition to the new Administration. Snowe has consistenly spoken against this kind of black-and-white view of party identity, putting it bluntly in her article about Specter, saying, "In my view, the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide. I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates." This new tactic of eliminating moderates from the GOP by repudiating them in divisive, narrow primaries is an all-out battle cry by Conservatives, and should alarm more people than it seems to.

It will be interesting to see what Snowe does the closer she gets to re-election in 2012. By that time the Republican electorate could look completely different, and what appears now to be Snowe teetering on the edge of a loss could be a non-issue. However, she is under continual fire from the GOP establishment for supporting the Obama administration on liberal initiatives like TARP and health care reform. The White House is near-obsessively courting Snowe on health care votes because she, along with Collins and Nelson (who yesterday announced he would support cloture on the Senate health care bill) is dead-center in the middle of the political spectrum and the president has been abundantly clear that he expects bipartisan cooperation on the bill. Failing to do so, if the bill passes or not, will be a blow to Obama's alleged "mandate," and would harm the Democratic platform and could topple moderates like Snowe who have aligned themselves with the bill and with the president. Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida has already been taken to task by Marco Rubio for literally embracing the president. Crist said, "The president of the United States is still the president," meaning he respects the office, regardless of party affiliation. It is not in Snowe's character or her record as a politician to bow to purely partisan machinations. However, she has also never before faced a serious challenge to her popularity.

The White House Project in 2006 published a list of women who they considered serious candidates for the presidency in 2008, called the "8 of '08". The contenders were: "...Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), Mayor Shirley Franklin (D-Atlanta), Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Governor Janet Napolitano (D-AZ), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (R), Governor Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS), and Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME)." With the exception of Mayor Franklin, all 8 of them are now or have been considered serious contenders for either the presidency or the vice-presidency, and 3 of them, Clinton, Napolitano and Sebelius are currently Cabinet members for President Obama, and Sen. Hutchinson is currently running for Governor in Texas. Rice effectively eliminated herself by being too tied to GW Bush, taking her out of consideration either for president or for John McCain's vice-president, although abundant evidence existed that she could or would consider either. Hillary Clinton came came closest to the presidency out of the 8, and may well be president yet, in spite of her current denials. Susan Collins ran for governor in Maine in 1994, but both she and her Democratic opponent, former Governor Joe Brennan lost to Independent Angus King. Collins has since moved on to the US Senate, and has built a steadily increasing coalition, winning her 2008 bid with 61.5% of the vote, her highest win percentage yet, and with a 23 point lead over her Democratic challenger, former Rep. Tom Allen. If she can pull her electoral coalition together, Snowe could easily emerge in 2012 as the Republican candidate for President, particularly if ultra-conservatives like Sarah Palin continue to polarize the party. Snowe's moderate views and thus-far unwavering loyalty to the GOP (in spite of ideological partings of the ways off and on) could easily position her as a more palatable option. With the exception of the divisive issues of abortion and gay marriage, Snowe supports the basic tenants of the Republican party, as illuminated by Pres. Ronald Reagan: "...restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty." The fact alone that Snowe is quoting Reagan, who has been adopted as the Tea Party movement's patron saint, shows that she is conscious of her role as a moderate and a moderator, and may well be preparing for showdown with conservatives.