Cliff’s Note:
I’ve been watching Susan Collins work her con since 2002, when I was a young campaign researcher in Portland, freezing my ass off and learning exactly how she does it: the concerned frown, the speech about how troubled she is, and then the vote that hands the other side everything it wanted.
This week, ProPublica put a new piece on the board: an FBI pay-to-play investigation that was circling her operation until Trump came back and it vanished. That’s strike three. I lay out all three below, plus the 1996 dirty trick she opened her career with, and why Maine finally gets to call the game in November.
This is the kind of piece Blue Amp exists to publish: someone who has been in the room, naming names, with the receipts. If you want more of that, become a paid member. You keep us independent and loud.
—Cliff
by Cliff Schecter
As the Boston Red Sox go to the playoffs today to face my beloved New York Yankees, baseball feels like an apt metaphor for New-England-based-Senator (though, her spine is stored down in Palm Beach), Susan Collins.
Baseball has a simple way to judge performance: three strikes, you’re out. If you follow the sport, then you know many more players are striking out than in the game’s past. The same is true with a plethora of politicians in our modern MAGA age. So when Collins began her political career by running for the U.S. Senate after Paul Revere began his midnight ride…wait, what’s that? They’re telling me she’s only been there 30 years.
Just feels like 200.
Maybe even more to me, as I moved up to Portland, ME in the fall of 2002, a young pup who post-9/11 wanted to get out of the the New York City/DC area, and gain experience in campaign research and communications. I worked for Chellie Pingree, now a Congresswoman, who was running against Collins. I worked with Hannah Pingree, likely to be Maine’s next governor in a few months. And I encountered, a metric shite ton of snow, some great lobster, and a brew pub I still fondly remember, Gritty McDuff’s, where one could tie one on with some locals.
A great experience overall, which allowed me to see how lucky we are to have the Pingree’s in office (trust me, I have jokes with friends in the biz about never wanting to vote for the people we actually work for. Chellie is the real deal. So is Hannah.). But it also allowed me to see up close what an absolute snake Susan Collins is—and I had to see it long before her own voters and most of America caught on. And then watch her win again and again by pretending to be Maine Nice, when she’s closer to Head Lice.
Now to the point. The latest bombshell reporting about the untoward relationship between Collins’ political operation and a sleazy defense contractor makes it worth looking back at the first two. Collins has tried for a third time to abscond with no damage from an ABSCAM. Sorry, Suse, but this time it ain’t happening. Because, the truth is, her political operation has always been as corrupt as any other pol you can name or fill up with helium to animate, like current Mitch McConnell. She’s just, cleverly, and corruptly camouflaged it behind a brand-borrowing, bumbling, ever-frowning persona.
Susan Collins is concerned, if you will.
Strike One: “He Learned His Lesson”
When Donald Trump faced his first impeachment, Collins voted to acquit him. Her reassurance? “I hope that the president has learned the lesson.” Uh huh. The five (or is it six?) bankruptcies, three marriages, fined $25MM for running a scam “university,” exposed on tape saying he could grab women “by the p*ssy,” (to quote Captain America, “I can do this all day”), and banned from ever running a foundation again in New York because he stole funds from:
Army Emergency Relief, the Children’s Aid Society, Citymeals-on-Wheels, Give an Hour, Martha’s Table, the United Negro College Fund, the United Way of National Capital Area, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Yeah, that’s definitely the kinda guy who learns his lesson. Which he would later, predictably prove again by inspiring and funding the January 6th coup, being adjudicated a rapist by a judge, and becoming our first felon President. Found guilty on 34 counts of being criminally stupid, and easily being a bigger d*k than possessed by Michelangelo's statue of David. For trying to overturn the 2020 election he was impeached again. Collins voted to convict him that time, but with six other Republicans doing it she absolutely had to. And the simple truth is, her first vote already told us what her warnings were worth: She could recognize the danger, deliver a concerned speech, and still let him walk.
