The Susan Collins Cure for Cynicism

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Congratulations are in order for Senator Susan Collins, who has confounded the pollsters to clinch a fifth term in the Senate. In the history of Maine, it is hard to think of a nastier campaign than the one run against her by the Democrat Sara Gideon and her backers, a typhoon of tycoons who parlayed tens of millions of dollars — something north of 68 million spondulix — to try to unseat the diminutive Republican from Caribou.

We confess we weren’t surprised at Maine’s decision to stick with Ms. Collins. Our secret Maine poll consists of the occasional phone conversations with Alan Baker. He’s one of America’s wisest newspapermen, and, until recently, proprietor of the Ellsworth American. Whenever we’ve called him, he’s assured us Ms. Collins would win. Mainers know better, he insisted, than to reject the senator who could emerge as the next chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee.

Never mind that every poll predicted that Mrs. Collins would be defeated by Ms. Gideon, speaker of the Maine House. The Party’s big out-of-state financiers sent prodigious amounts of money. One political action committee alone sent $27 million. There followed a cataract of such libels of Ms. Collins as this, or any state, has rarely before seen. She’d changed, she was for big money, she truckled to Mitch McConnell, etc. etc.

The main source of the Democrats’ anger against Ms. Collins, an understated aisle-crosser, was clearly her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Ms. Collins explained her decision in one of the finest speeches ever delivered in the Senate. “Certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them,” she’d confessed.

“We must always remember,” Ms. Collins added, “that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” The speech, in our view, ranks with that in which Margaret Chase Smith, another Maine giant, inveighed against McCarthyism. Our own theory is that it was the principled nature of Ms. Collins’ remarks that inflamed the Democrats. She had not, after all, spoken on abortion or same sex marriage or any of the issues on which the left fears Justice Kavanaugh.

We don’t mind saying that we’ve found Ms. Collins disappointing on some issues. She’s indicated, say, that she’s going to vote against President Trump’s nominee for the Federal Reserve, Judy Shelton, though Ms. Shelton is similar to Ms. Collins in her preparedness to stand apart and on principle. And despite the fact that Ms. Shelton has been inaccurately maligned the way Ms. Collins was in the just-ended campaign.

In any event, an editorial in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal calls Ms. Collins’ victory “a reminder that durable majorities in a diverse America require broad coalitions.” Elsewhere, the Journal remarks on how the 2020 election disproves, yet again, the notion that big money can buy elections. Ms. Collins spent well less than half (about 38%) of what her opponent spent, according to OpenSecrets. What a cure for cynicism.

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The headline was updated in this edition.


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