A few years ago, a middle schooler in Western Maine asked Sen. Susan Collins which of her many colleagues over the years had she accomplished the most with. Collins answered thoughtfully and dutifully: Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who was his party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000.
Later that same day, Collins learned her old friend had died. She told this story at Lieberman’s public memorial in 2024.
It strikes me now that the values Lieberman stood for — and the qualities and principles that drew Collins to him to begin with — were dead by then. The middle ground between the two parties had long since become a wasteland.
As a political reporter in Connecticut for many years, I knew Lieberman as a friendly man who cared about getting stuff done, a man who put compromise before confrontation. Through it all, he was, as Collins herself once said, “a person of integrity, honor, compassion and warmth.”
For decades, it was an image Collins tried to cultivate for herself. In recent years, however, the rise of President Trump has left her with dwindling evidence for it.
This past weekend, at Maine’s Republican Party convention in Augusta, Collins sent a message to Mainers that I hope will register clearly with them: she has given up on following Joe Lieberman’s path.
Collins happily proclaimed “Paul LePage is back” and insisted the combative — and, in recent years, absent — former governor’s common sense and business acumen would be of benefit if he wins Maine’s 2nd District congressional race.
Collins posed for a photograph with a talking head from the Maine Wire, the state’s leading farm of racist and discriminatory content. More than that, Sen. Collins had no difficulty gripping the right-wing website’s “Sword of Truth,” an extraordinarily pathetic symbol of its hatred and mockery of the state’s immigrants and minorities, of its on-the-hour cries of “fraud.”
Collins urged support for GOP candidates across the state, encouragement that captures even bigoted opportunists like gubernatorial frontrunner Bobby Charles.
The senator, in her remarks, eyed the ongoing ugliness of life in the nation’s capital and denounced who? Sen. Chuck Schumer. For President Trump, the clear source of today’s chaos and consternation, she had not a single harsh word.
In 2012, Lieberman left the Senate. Departing, he warned his colleagues to reach across the aisle to find partners and told them to put “the interests of country and constituents ahead of the dictates of party and ideology.”
That was going to be necessary, Lieberman warned, “to solve our nation’s biggest problems and address our nation’s biggest challenges before they become crises or catastrophes.”
Four years later, I read the courageous op-ed Collins wrote for The Washington Post ahead of the 2016 presidential election that starkly laid out her take on Trump.
Collins said at the time she was “deeply concerned that Mr. Trump’s lack of self-restraint and his barrage of ill-informed comments would make an already perilous world even more so.”
She highlighted Trump’s “tendency to lash out when challenged” and how this personal proclivity “further escalates the possibility of disputes spinning dangerously out of control.”
She concluded that “the unpleasant reality that I have had to accept is that there will be no ‘new’ Donald Trump, just the same candidate who will slash and burn and trample anything and anyone he perceives as being in his way or an easy scapegoat.”
Slashing, burning and trampling. That is the same Trump whose nominees for high public office Collins has supported, even flamboyant kooks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Supreme Court aspirants who tossed Roe v. Wade into the trash heap.
Collins used to try to follow Lieberman’s advice. Today, she truckles to Trump and poses, smiling, with racist rabblerousers. She is wrapped up in the dictates of ideology, no matter how unsavory, no matter how unbecoming of her office.
In short, Susan Collins is no longer the senator Mainers thought they sent to Washington three decades ago. It’s possible she never was.