March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Collins’ role in hearings draws pundits to Maine

There’s a fine old tradition among the major newspapers during the warm weather months.

As summer settles over stifling Washington, D.C., The Washington Post and The New York Times compete with each other to unearth a credible excuse to send their top political reporters to Maine, where between stops at the lobster pound, intrepid big-city journalists seek out cosmic trends among our electorate.

All good Muslims make their pilgrimage to Mecca. For the East Coast establishment press, the sacred destinations are Mount Desert Island, Blue Hill, Castine and Southwest Harbor, where many former comrades-in-arms have retired. Michael Winerip, writing for the Sunday New York Times Magazine, crisscrossed the state recently, searching for the political soul of Sen. Susan Collins.

“Freshman senators usually fight for attention, but with the balance of power in Congress shifting to the middle, Susan Collins of Maine is wooed left, right and center,” wrote Winerip in a piece headlined “A Moderate’s Moment.” The Senate hearings into campaign fund-raising abuses will make Collins a Washington “star,” fellow Timesman William Safire predicted.

Not to be outdone, The Washington Post dispatched veteran congressional correspondent Helen Dewar Down East for a sampling of voter sentiment on the Senate hearings supposedly boosting Collins’ career.

“Like many other people in this flinty, independent-minded state, Clayton Coffin, a site manager for Atlantic Salmon Co. [in Bucks Harbor] has tuned out the Senate’s hearing on campaign financing abuses …,” wrote Dewar in an Aug. 19 story headlined “In State Pushing Clean Elections, Campaign Hearings Hardly a Ripple.”

“It’s all a bunch of mumbo jumbo,” Steve Hendricks, a Lubec painter, told Dewar. The Post cited a new Pew Research Center poll indicating that only one in 10 Americans is following the Senate hearings.

The conflicting views of two of America’s greatest newspapers are somewhat amusing to Collins, who is holed up at her cottage on Sebago Lake doing what most Mainers do during the month of August — sticking her toes in the water and catching up on her reading. It is not surprising that many Mainers are not focused on the fund-raising abuses, Collins said.

After all, most of them are on vacation.

From personal experience, I can testify that not a single golfer has questioned me about Johnny Chung and Charlie Trie, or asked me to explain the subtle distinctions between “soft” and “hard” money contributions.

Nevertheless, Collins said she thinks “people are more interested in the issue than the Post story implied.”

There’s a perception that President Clinton gains the most if U.S. voters respond with a big yawn to the congressional probes into money laundering and foreign influence-peddling during last year’s elections.

But the Republican Party would be an even bigger winner than Clinton.

Despite the alleged widespread Democratic abuses, Republicans raised nearly twice as much corporate and special-interest dollars as Democrats. Clinton has run his last political campaign. Future Democratic candidates, some of them tainted by the current scandals, will be even more out-gunned by Republicans if the system remains unchanged.

That’s just the outcome Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is hoping for. He is the main opponent of the McCain-Feingold Senate campaign finance bill that Collins supports. In an interview with The New York Times last week, McConnell claimed that the $2 billion spent on federal political campaigns last year was hardly scandalous. It amounted, he said, to only about 1 percent of total television advertising, averaging $3.89 per eligible congressional voter.

Collins, who is in McConnell’s doghouse, is one of only a handful of Republicans advocating campaign reform, which explains why her performance in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has been so closely watched. She lamented the fact that the current scandals have led many voters to conclude that politicians only take action in response to campaign contributions.

That is not the reality within the spectrum of Maine politics, the GOP senator insisted. Collins’ old boss, William Cohen, threw all his influence on the Senate Armed Services Committee to ensure that the Bath Iron Works and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard were fairly treated by Pentagon procurement officials despite the fact that year after year union workers at those facilities endorsed and contributed money to Cohen’s Democratic opponents. No member of the Maine congressional delegation would refuse to meet with, or work on behalf of, a constituent because that individual had not made a campaign contribution, Collins said.

Despite growing pessimism among reform advocates, Collins thinks a bare-bones legislative change will be enacted during the current congressional session. Such a proposal could take form around legislation being drafted in the House by a bipartisan freshman group led by Rep. Tom Allen of Maine. That plan would ban “soft money,” the type of contributions at the center of the current controversy.

Collins said she has discussed the bill with Allen and described the measure as a “good starting point” for campaign reform. The Senate bill that Collins supports is more far-reaching, but given the perceived voter apathy and entrenched opposition by leaders of both parties, a ban on “soft money … is where we may end up,” Collins said.

The fact that Collins and Allen have emerged as major players in Washington’s campaign reform movement suggests that Mainers are not totally uninterested in the issue, despite the alluring distractions of summer vacation pursuits. — OTIS


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