Bill Nemitz has a column in today’s Portland Press Herald practically lauding Sen. Olympia Snowe for straddling the fence on health care and not publicly saying how she’ll vote.
I don’t know how it’s playing out in other areas of the country, but it seems that barely a day goes by when Sen. Snowe isn’t mentioned in some way as being the most important person in Washington due to her upcoming vote next week on the health care bill.
As everyone who is following the health care debate knows, Sen. Snowe is a moderate Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and her vote on the health care bill is deemed to be critical to its passage.
How will she vote? Will she stick with the unified Republican party and vote against the bill? Or will she buck her own party and do “what’s right for the country” and support the Democats in their efforts to reform health care?
Bill Nemitz writes:
Snowe isn't yet ready to tip her hand on whether she – the only Republican on the committee (and in the entire Senate, for that matter) who's willing to even consider supporting the bill – will actually vote for it.
She won’t say. So what else is new?
She’s been in the center of this debate for months and being on the Senate Finance Committee probably knows more about the bill than most of her GOP colleagues — and yet she says she hasn’t decided how she’ll vote.
Give me a break.
My guess is that Sen. Snowe knows exactly how she’ll vote and is simply dragging out the process until the last second. After all, it appears that 99 out of 100 Senators know how they’ll vote. Sen. Snowe knows that newspapers and the general public eat up every story that features her as the moderate Republican maverick who single-handedly holds the health care fate of the nation in her hands. You can’t buy that type of high profile publicity and it will go a long way to securing her continued popularity in Maine.
So why not keep everyone guessing? Each day her status rises in the eyes of most folks in Maine. Heck, she’s probably known how she’ll vote for months — but why not keep folks wondering if all you get is positive press. Sen. Snowe is schrewd enough to know that the longer she drags out this process and keeps newspapers mentioning her name, the more most folks back home are delighted that every time they mention Olympia Snowe, they write that she’s a senator from Maine.
I have just two questions?
(1) If Sen. Snowe is going to vote in favor of the health care bill (and that’s a BIG if — my guess is that she’ll go with her own party), why didn’t she get on board early and help sway some of other Republicans to avoid all this political misery the country has been going through?
(2) Where is our other “independently thinking” Republican senator in this health care debate? Why is Sen. Susan Collins letting Sen. Snowe take the lead in this health care debate while she simply sits on the sidelines and marches arm-in-arm with her GOP colleagues?
This is what Sen. Collins says about health care on her website:
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