Where Is Olympia Snowe Going?

The saddest part of this article is the "good riddance" response from a conservative source. Maybe there are Republicans who think it's good for the party to run sitting office-holders out of the party, but I believe that those people have lost sight of the purpose of a political party.

Years ago, numerically-inclined political scientists figured out that you could set up a "Guttman scale" of Congressional votes, ordered from liberal to conservative, and specify just where any given member fell on that scale. For example, only the most liberal members would vote for a single-payer healthcare system, and only the most conservative would vote against the nomination of Ray LaHood for Transportation Secretary. The Republicans seem to be trying to confine their party to those few loyalists scoring a perfect "10" on that scale.

This sort of exclusion is making the Republican Party into a regional party, one whose partisans will fit the same space on the electoral map as did supporters of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.

A while back I published an essay by Dave Drake about his feelings of having been abandoned by the Republican Party. Apparently, Olympia Snowe feels the same way.