Counting is Even Harder

"What Does Olympia Snow Want?" asks our curious analyst. And, really, who hasn't tried to glean the inner workings of the moderate Republican Senator's brain?

I think what Olympia Snowe wants is not to vote for an unpopular health care bill that pisses off her constituents. She's already the Republican who enabled the stimulus. If she does this, she's going to have to leave the party. The electoral history of Lieberman, Jeffords, and Specter does not indicate that leaving your party for the other side is the gateway to an exciting and rewarding electoral career.

Of those three people who "left" their party, only Lieberman has run for reelection. He won. Additionally, he didn't "leave" his party so much as he was forced out by a loss in the primaries, but whatever.

It's true that going zero-for-zero isn't really "exciting" but it also seems to me to not be very "relevant."

If she leaves the party and Republicans regain the Senate, they will take their revenge.

Huh-doy. And if she doesn't leave the party and Dems gain further ground, she will also be marginalized. Captain Obvious called. He wants his fucking job back. He also wants to punch Megan in the fucking face, but we don't endorse violence here so we're not passing that message along.

The problem is that what she wants--a cheap bill that doesn't either force a bunch of people to buy coverage they can't afford, or leave a bunch of people uninsured--is not possible. I assume that she actually knows this. So her public dithering means one of two things: she has decided to break with her party, and she wants to signal how difficult this decision is; or she has decided to torpedo the hope of busting a filibuster, and wants to signal to her Democratic constituents that she was forced to it by a bad plan. Which is it? Only God and Olympia Snowe know.

The idea that a Republican is being naive or willfully obstructionist is, of course, out of the question. Only Democratic Presidents can do that.

The longer this drags out, the more opportunity there is for something to go wrong. Every time the Republicans force them to take some bad-sounding provision out of the bill, public trust erodes. So the longer she dithers, the less helpful she is to the Democrats. She may be hoping that if she holds out long enough, the Democrats will break ranks and she won't have to make a painful choice.

Love the neutral voice here. "She may be forgoing actually governing for her own political expedience, and I see nothing wrong with that!"

IOKIYAR.