The Democratic deal

Why did Chellie Pingree, the Democratic progressives’ best hope, accept becoming a sacrifice to Susan Collins?

By Lance Tapley

Why are the two men in this photo smiling?

Well, when the state’s two congressmen, John Baldacci (left) and Tom Allen, stood grinning behind former State Senator Chellie Pingree at an April news conference announcing she was seeking the Democratic US Senate nomination, they had a lot to smile about.

Second District Democrat Baldacci, who is running for governor, is undoubtedly smiling because in a bold political deal he maneuvered Pingree out of opposing him in the gubernatorial primary, a campaign she had already begun. By helping convince her to run instead against incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins in 2002, he made sure he wouldn’t have to fight against a more liberal opponent. He was expected to win, but a rough primary battle might have driven some liberals into the arms of Jonathan Carter or whomever the Green Party puts up in the general election.

First District Democrat Allen may be smiling with bittersweet relief. The Senate nomination would have been his for the asking, and a lot of Democrats wanted him to ask. But he decided not to run, many political insiders assume, because he felt he couldn’t beat Collins. Now Pingree takes the risk of political dismemberment, and he will

likely continue in the US Representative job that he currently enjoys.

But the more poignant question is: Why is Chellie Pingree smiling?

The pleasant, intelligent, 46-year-old former Senate majority leader, the Great Blonde Hope of Democratic progressives, the tireless fighter for reduced prescription-drug prices and for tying corporation tax breaks to a “living wage” for their workers, is now facing a year and a half of begging for money from rich people and organizations that expect their favors returned. She will have to repeat tired lines day after day to mostly indifferent voters. And her reward? If Maine political history is a guide, she will be trounced so badly that she will never be able to return to politics.

When the Aztecs made their human sacrifices, perhaps their willing maidens were smiling, too.

For the fact is this: Susan Collins, 48, now ending her first six-year term, is extremely popular. According to the dean of Maine pollsters, Bowdoin College government professor Chris Potholm, Collins “consistently has an approval rating in the low 70s” as a percentage of voters polled. Potholm is a Republican, but he is not working for Collins, and he is known for giving out honest numbers.

These numbers put Collins in the political stratosphere — in other words, in the Olympia Snowe zone. Last year, Maine’s Republican senior senator butchered, 69 percent to 31 percent, a State House Democratic figure like Pingree in the person of Mark Lawrence, the Senate president.

Besides high voter approval, Collins shares other characteristics with Snowe, which explain that high approval. She is moderate (pro-choice, for example), independent (she voted against impeaching President Clinton), and, most important, she is an incumbent, which means almost automatic re-election unless some disaster occurs.

So why would Chellie Pingree accept such a deal?

One possibility is that she is operating under the classic “sacrificial lamb” theory. When he opposed Snowe, Lawrence seemed to be trying to put himself in a position to run for governor or Congress. But no political lambs have re-emerged from a slaughter to a popular incumbent in a general election in at least the last 30 years of Maine history. Voters or contributors do not like big losers. Lawrence has not been heard from since November. Pingree, of course, denies the sacrificial-lamb strategy.

Another theory making the rounds of the State House is that Baldacci promised a cabinet job to her, should he become governor. “There is absolutely no deal,” says Pingree.

And then there is the theory that she was simply snookered by Baldacci and the Democratic establishment. If she had remained in the gubernatorial primary and made a respectable showing, which seemed quite likely, at least she would have politically lived to fight another day for progressive causes.

Pingree uses ritualistic phrases to explain her decision. She switched the office she was aiming at “for the good of the party . . . Now we will have a strong, united ticket,” she concludes. She seems eager and optimistic about the race as she talks on the phone from her home office on the idyllic island of North Haven — taking time out to greet a couple of neighborhood children coming to her door: “I’m respectful of the challenge, but I think I have excellent prospects . . . I like fighting for the right things.”

The deal rankles some

This is the most arranged election I’ve seen,” grumbles Harold Pachios of Portland about the Baldacci-Pingree deal. “In the past, Democrats have prided themselves on open elections, but this was decided in a smoke-filled room.” A lobbyist and long-time party wheeler and dealer who knows something about smoke-filled rooms, Pachios is “not involved” in the primary battle, he claims, but he has good words to say about Chris Harte.

Millionaire Harte, 53, of Cumberland, a former president of the Portland Newspapers who is originally from Texas (he has lived in Maine only nine years), is pondering the nomination. He has assembled a team of advisers including the high-powered, Washington, D.C., media strategy firm of Squier Knapp Dunn Communications, whose clients have included the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000.

In a statement issued around the time of the Pingree announcement, Harte took a dig at her: “I’m not exploring this race because I need an office to run for (Pingree was term-limited out of her State Senate job), and I haven’t looked at any other race.”

But he sounds uncertain about jumping in. He refuses to discuss issues or handicap the opposition. This is unusually diffident for a politician talking to the press about a US Senate race. He is getting encouragement, but “I’m not getting encouragement from everyone,” he concedes.

Every player in Democratic politics, however, is respectful of Harte’s wealth when thinking about a race that will cost millions by the time the general election takes place. He is a member of the family that used to own the Harte-Hanks newspaper empire.

Comparing Harte’s personal resources with his own, Bob Dunfey Jr., another potential Democratic primary candidate, comments: “I don’t have the wealth to do the Chris Harte sort of thing.” Dunfey, 49, of York, former New England head of the General Services Administration under Clinton and before that a real-estate developer in Southern Maine, says he is “pretty much committed” to running. He is raising money and putting together a staff. A marathon runner, he believes he has the stamina for the Senate race. But, like Harte, he has never run for office.

Dunfey says he will present himself as a candidate with “a strong business background” and feels comfortable with the political stance taken by the moderate-conservative Democratic Leadership Council, a national group. “I am more to the right of Chellie,” he asserts. In a political conversation, he seems oriented to Massachusetts, where he had an office for the past eight years. An offshoot of a prominent Democratic, hotel-owning family spread over Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, he claims he has a “golden Rolodex.”

Although there have been rumors about Attorney General Steven Rowe seeking the Democratic nomination, he responds — after a long, agonized pause on the phone in which he seems to be making up his mind — that he is too new in the AG’s job to consider any other office. “Rowe was the guy left sucking his thumb in the Baldacci-Pingree deal,” says one knowledgeable politician speaking not for attribution.

Despite these possibilities for opposition, Pingree is the presumptive Democratic nominee. With Baldacci, Allen, and party statesman and former US Senator George Mitchell supporting her, the establishment has fully accepted her. She has some fame from pushing the nation’s first state prescription-drug-pricing bill through the legislature. She has an electoral base in rural Knox County, with a record of actually running for office and winning elections. With a vast array of political contacts statewide compared to Harte or Dunfey, and with a broad political résumé that sounds senatorial — a senior fellow at Washington’s Center for Policy Alternatives think tank, a political observer in Bosnia, a “trainer of political leaders” in Northern Ireland — she also is the only female in a primary in which close to 60 percent of those who turn out will be women, according to her pollster, Celinda Lake.

Lake, one of Washington’s top political strategists, also points out that about a third of the Democrats who vote in the primary are senior citizens. Pingree’s prescription drug legislation, recently upheld by the US Circuit Court of Appeals, should go over well with them. In sum, how will Pingree distinguish herself from her likely primary opponent or opponents? “Her record,” Lake says simply.

Sounding a similar note, Ned McCann, a Maine AFL-CIO lobbyist in Augusta, expects the 50,000-strong labor federation to support Pingree. “We love Chellie’s incredible record,” he says, mentioning that Chris Harte, when he ran the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, “didn’t go over well” with the union movement during labor disputes at the newspapers.

Independent Gov. Angus King’s name periodically surfaces as a Collins challenger, but he insists that he will not enter the race. Instead, he says through a spokesman, when he leaves office he will rent a Winnebago and travel the country with his family.

The Green Independent Party is not planning to enter the battle, focusing instead on running a candidate for governor. John Rensenbrink, the Green candidate in the 1996 Senate race (he got four percent to Collins’s 49 percent, former Democratic Gov. Joseph Brennan’s 44 percent, and conservative independent William Clarke’s three percent), sees Pingree as so progressive that he once suggested to her that she seek the Green gubernatorial nomination.

POWER OF THE PRESS: As an example of an incumbent’s influence, Collins garnered the front page of the local section the two days following Pingree’s announcement.

The Democratic arguments against Collins

Given Collins’s present popularity, though, how can Pingree or any Democrat have a chance of beating her? The Dems seem to be coalescing around two arguments:

Collins is not Olympia Snowe: “Olympia has deeper roots politically,” says Pingree adviser Lake. “I think Collins suffers a little by comparison. Even on personal style, she doesn’t have stature.” A yourcongress.com poll, for instance, shows Snowe the ninth and Collins the 85th most powerful person in the Senate.

A strategy adviser to Dunfey, Jim Spencer of Boston, feels that Collins’s current high approval number in the polls “probably means Maine people see her as Olympia Snowe.” She’s “an add-on,” he says, to Snowe’s popularity. The Democrats will focus on showing that she’s less independent and moderate than Snowe. “She doesn’t vote like Maine” in Congress, Spencer says. This last point leads into the second, more important, and heavily repeated Democratic argument:

Collins is George W. Bush. The assumption here is that President Bush is out of sync with Maine and that his conservative politics can be draped on Collins like a smelly Texas armadillo skin. “Gore won the state, not Bush,” notes Spencer. Collins “will be stuck with her Bush votes” such as to repeal the estate tax, says the AFL-CIO’s McCann.

Pingree D.C. media consultant Will Robinson contributes the somber argument that if the economy goes into recession and energy costs rise during Bush’s tenure “people will hold incumbents accountable for what happens.” In any case, Robinson thinks that Collins is in a trap of having to follow Senate Republican leader Trent Lott’s pro-Bush conservative agenda through a narrowly divided Senate while wanting to demonstrate independence and moderation more suitable to Maine voters.

Pingree herself criticizes Collins for supporting conservative John Ashcroft for Bush’s attorney general, for “voting six times against a high minimum wage,” for opposing a measure that would have given the state more funds for school construction, and for opposing a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

The Republican response

Susan Collins says that, while she hasn’t done any polling, the low-70s approval in Potholm’s poll coincides with what her political instincts tell her. “When I come back to Maine on the weekends and people stop me in the supermarket I always know before I read the polls how I’m doing,” she says.

A master of an easy-going and unpretentious manner à la Olympia Snowe, Collins is momentarily stumped when asked the ultimate softball question: Why are you so popular?

“The people of the state appreciate an independent mind,” she responds. “I work very hard. I’m very accessible. I don’t take myself too seriously. I’m proud to be a moderate Republican.” This sums up her message. And the value of a moderate Republican may have gone up with Vermont Senator James Jeffords’s recent defection from the party.

Although she voted for President Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax cut and tight budget, she counters Democratic criticisms of her allegiance to Bush by references — discussing just education — to successfully attempting with Senator Jeffords to add billions to special education funding ($68 million more for Maine, she says); successfully increasing Title 1 funds to help in the schooling of poor children; successfully opposing Bush’s school vouchers, which were taken out of the big education bill the president is pushing; and along with Senator Snowe unsuccessfully trying to create a school-construction alternative that would have, she says, provided more money than the Democratic measure she ultimately voted against. The alternative would have provided more flexibility to school districts on how to spend the money.

She also was the third Republican senator to sign onto the McCain-Feingold campaign financing reform bill. Like Snowe, she trumpets her bipartisanship. And this bipartisanship extends to her highly visible pro-choice position on abortion issues, which she shares with Pingree and which erases one of the usual big dividing lines between Democrats and Republicans.

The power of a moderate incumbent

Republican pollster Potholm comments on Collins’s re-election chances: “All these reasons liberal Democrats put up to explain her vulnerability — the vote for Ashcroft and so forth — don’t have any impact beyond the liberal Democrats. And the Democrats seem to be hoping for a recession to defeat her, but even if we have a dinky little recession it won’t have any effect on this race.”

Potholm scoffs at Democratic attempts to portray Collins as much to the right of Snowe: “Whether she’s five percent more conservative — however people define ‘moderate’, they’re both there.” Collins chief of staff Steve Abbott says of his boss and Olympia Snowe: “Their voting records are virtually identical.”

But in the perception-driven world of politics, the real Republican defense to the Democratic sword thrusts is the shield of inevitability of a popular incumbent. “If Collins is so vulnerable,” Potholm asks, “why didn’t Tom Allen run against her?” A prominent adviser to the Baldacci gubernatorial campaign says, off the record, that the popularity of Collins in the polls drove Allen from the race.

Allen, however, denies that it was cold feet that made him decide against confronting Collins. A poll’s results mean little this far from the election, he says. But to defeat an incumbent, “I’d have to stop all my legislative work and spend a year and a half campaigning,” he adds. “I like being in the House working on important issues such as prescription drugs and clean air.” Chellie Pingree, on the other hand, is able to campaign full time.

Allen stresses that the Jeffords defection shows how far to the right the Bush administration is going, and this will mean “a credible Democrat in November, 2002, will be in fairly good shape.” He has an analysis showing Maine getting $44 million less in federal funds in the next fiscal year as a result of the president’s budget cuts. The Senate race, he says, will come down to a debate on Susan Collins’s votes.

Still, most political observers of any party are prepared to believe Senator Collins is, at least for now, very popular. Republican State Senator Peter Mills, not known for the political spin on his utterances, believes she is “equally well regarded as Olympia. She’s steered enough away from Bush” to please the independent and not terribly conservative Maine electorate, he says.

Severin Beliveau, a lobbyist and the Maine Democratic Party’s most eminent éminence grise, concedes that the low-70s approval rating “could be true” and that Collins “will be very difficult to defeat.” He credits Collins also with “an excellent program for dealing with constituents.” She will not only have the resources of the national Republican Party behind her, he notes, but “the treasury of the US government” in the federal funds she will get Bush to flow to Maine projects and into her political account.

As an example of the power of incumbency, in the next two issues after Pingree’s announcement, which secured that picture with Allen and Baldacci in the Press Herald, the Portland daily carried a photo of Collins accompanying prominent stories with the headlines “Collins takes lead in education negotiations” and “Gas prices likely to level off,” both articles essentially press releases from Collins’s office.

“I don’t know of any defining issue to distinguish” Collins and Pingree, opines Beliveau.

Celinda Lake says she’ll distinguish them by presenting Pingree as “a unique fighter for Maine values and families.” But even if the Democrats try hitting Collins with the left hook, which would seem to be Pingree’s natural punch, instead of this soft centrist cliché, how could it have any impact when even Green Party guru John Rensenbrink says Collins “is better on issues than she is given credit for”? A Democrat’s ability to outflank her would seem to be limited. Rensenbrink’s comment “is a litmus test” on the breadth of Collins’s appeal, claims Potholm.

This could be “a sleeper, an upset,” Lake says, perhaps inadvertently telegraphing the real hopes of the Democrats against popular incumbent Susan Collins.

>Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.