Snowe still center of attention

By Jennifer J. Foster

If U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) thought that finally throwing her support behind Max Baucus’ health care bill this week would turn the media and political spotlight away from its months-long focus on her—well, she’s going to be disappointed.

As attention now turns to efforts to pull the five different legislative proposals together in some form that can muster passage in the House and 60 (or, 51, depending on whom you ask) votes in the Senate, Snowe’s involvement in the compromise is drawing more scrutiny than ever.

Ahead of her pivotal vote in the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, The New York Times profiled Snowe’s life in an attempt to add depth to America’s understanding of her. As it turns out, health care and hospitals have been a part of her life for all but eight of her 62 years.

Ms. Snowe was orphaned at 9 when she lost her father, a short-order cook, to a heart attack barely a year after her mother had died of breast cancer. She was separated from her older brother and raised by her aunt, a textile worker, and uncle, a barber, both of whom struggled to support six children on meager earnings.

She became a widow at 26 when her first husband was killed in a car crash, and later lost a 20-year-old stepson to a heart ailment.

“Especially when you lose your parents at a young age, you definitely learn to pick yourself up and dust yourself off,” said Ms. Snowe, 62. “You just have to keep working and moving and living. And, in my position, you learn to translate that empathy of your experience into legislation.”

Ms. Snowe, who served 16 years in the House before her election to the Senate in 1994, has long devoted herself to women’s health issues like breast and ovarian cancer and osteoporosis. She attributes this interest in part to the experience of her mother, whose fatal battle with cancer provided Ms. Snowe an early window into the health care system, albeit one that has grown foggy over time.

“It was pretty much a horrible struggle,” said Ms. Snowe, recalling that her mother was in and out of a hospital in Lewiston, Me., in her last months. She said that she did not even know whether her mother had had health insurance, but that money had been extremely tight. “We didn’t have anything,” she said.

Snowe is a pragmatist. She is a pragmatist because her life has not allowed her the luxury of partisan philosophy.

Well, as it turns out, partisans don’t care much for pragmatists—and liberal partisans, especially, don’t care for the influence Snowe has had on the health care effort.

From CNN:

House Democrats, meanwhile, wasted no time in blasting Snowe’s recent influence in the controversial debate.

“This is the United States of America. This is not the United States of Maine,“ said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-California. “I mean that one senator cannot hold the entire nation’s health care plan hostage.“

Oh, Lynn. That’s so cute. Did you come up with it all by yourself?

Lynn Woolsey: Terrific partisan. Terrible stateswoman.

The partisans’ objection to Snowe’s involvement in the health care debate is based solely on her opposition to—or, at the very least, her caution toward—the public option.

But the challenge now for Democrats is that Snowe opposes what most of them support: a government-sponsored health care option.

... Since Snowe is the only Republican so far to back a Democratic plan, that carries a lot of weight with the White House and Senate Democratic leaders.

President Obama has singled out Snowe “for both the political courage and the seriousness of purpose that she’s demonstrated throughout this process.“

But Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Virginia, said he understands how important it is to President Obama to be able to call his health care bill bipartisan.

“It looks as though the way the White House is maneuvering right now, that it is incredibly important to them to get at least one Republican, that being Olympia Snowe.“

... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that his hope is for more Republicans to work with Democrats and not just “one senator from Maine.“

Um, Snowe is one of hundreds of Republicans in Congress. When is it going to occur to liberal Democrats that perhaps there’s a reason there is only one Republican willing to listen—and that is a problem?

Progressive Democrats, sources say, used Thursday’s meeting to make a passionate plea for a Senate bill with a public option.

But the struggle for Democratic leaders is that the public option will unlikely fly with some conservative Democrats and Snowe ... Snowe believes that a public option should be “triggered” down the road only if market reforms fail to bring health care costs down.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, blasted the idea of a trigger option.

“The idea that we are going to succumb to the insurance industry’s fears and then do a trigger, which means that our constituency—the American people—will delay in getting a public option, that’s like the house of cards just collapsing on top of us,“ she said.

Hey, Sheila. Technically, your constituency is your district in Texas, not the entire United States of America. But I can understand how you have forgotten that, what with being so busy being a national partisan and all. But while we’re on that: I’m an American person, and I don’t want the public option. If it ends up in the bill, it better be attached to a trigger. Otherwise, you know, I might suspect that the public option itself—not reform—is your endgame.

Let me make something clear: I don’t agree with Snowe on all the issues. But I appreciate the way she is going about this debate and wielding her power in a responsible way.

For her part, Snowe is handling liberals’ criticism just the way you would expect: With pragmatism.

“The brilliance of our Founding Fathers was this: that they gave power equally to every member of the United States Senate, whether you represented a large state or a small state, and exercising that authority in a positive way,“ she said.

Good for you, Olympia Snowe. At least we have one voice of reason in Congress.