Editorial: Collins should get off the fence

2007-07-22

Source: Kennebec Journal

Republican Senator Olympia Snowe didn't do her Senate colleague Susan Collins any favors when she broke with the Bush White House and came out clearly and unequivocally in favor of a Democratic measure to cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq.

"We are at the crossroads of hope and reality," said Snowe almost two weeks ago, "and the time has come to address reality." There isn't a Democrat in sight who's been able to issue such a devastating one-sentence critique of a war gone horribly wrong. Snowe's statement, artfully and implicitly, called continued pursuit of the war in Iraq what it needed to be called: Irrational.

But in doing so, she clearly etched a dividing line between herself and Collins, who -- despite poll numbers that show Mainers are overwhelmingly in favor of a troop pullout -- has so far been unable to articulate a clear position against the conduct of the war. Collins' challenger for her seat, U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, couldn't have done a better job of making the junior Maine senator look like she's trying to straddle the fence.

And this past week, Collins just compounded the perception. Faced with a Republican filibuster of the troop pullout measure in the Senate, Collins said she was against the filibuster -- and joined Snowe, two other Republicans and the vast majority of Democrats in voting to end it -- but not in favor of the measure that was being filibustered. You will be forgiven if you find that position just a little too, well, nuanced.

Collins' defense is that she's in favor of another measure that will shift the responsibility of our troops in Iraq from combat to a non-combat role and that she led opposition to the current troop surge when it was proposed months ago. And, she says, she supports the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which relied on diplomacy rather than force to accomplish the pacification of Iraq.

Collins is already, more than a year away from election day 2008, in a serious and challenging re-election fight against an anti-war Democrat whose supporters are hammering her for not opposing the war. Yet her base is Republican and that does include at least some voters who support the president's approach. And Collins, along with the majority of Republicans in Washington, remains caught in the uncomfortable vice grip of a White House that will brook no challenges to its disastrous war policy. What an awful time to be running as a Republican for re-election -- we suspect that being Olympia Snowe, who has a few more years left before her term is up, looks awfully good to Collins right now.

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