Cliff’s Note:
I’ve been watching Susan Collins’ con since 2002, when as a young campaign hand in Portland, ME I froze my ass off and learned how she does it: a concerned frown, a speech about how troubled she is, and then a vote handng the other side all it wanted.
ProPublica’s put a new piece on the board: an FBI pay-to-play investigation circling her operation til Trump made it vanish. Strike three. I lay them out below. Plus the 1996 dirty trick that launched her, and why Maine finally gets to call the game in Nov.
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—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, with spine stored 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 past. The same is true with 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 some 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 the locals.
A great experience overall, it allowed me to see how lucky we are to have Pingrees in office (trust me, we have jokes in the biz about not wanting to vote for people we actually work for, because we got to know them. Chellie’s 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.
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Now to our point. The latest bombshell reporting about the untoward relationship between Collins’ political operation and a sleazy defense contractor makes it worth looking back at her lousy career. 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 enough helium to animate. Like current Mitch McConnell. She has just cleverly and corruptly camouflaged it behind a brand-borrowing, bumbling, ever-frowning persona.
Susan Collins is always very concerned, if you will. So let’s take at look at her way-too-long at bat in politics.
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,” and banned from ever running a foundation again in New York because he stole funds (to quote Captain America with respect to listing Trump scandals, “I can do this all day”) 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 a guy who learns his lesson. Which he would later, predictably learn yet again as he inspired and funded the January 6th coup, was adjudicated a rapist by a judge, and became our first felon President. Found guilty on 34 counts of being criminally stupid, and easily a bigger d*k than possessed by Michelangelo's statue of David. For trying to overturn the 2020 election he was impeached yet 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.
