Susan Collins Wakes Up And Realizes She's Facing The Toughest Reelection Campaign Of Her Career

Blue America donors noticed before anyone else outside of Maine. Judging by the relative number of contributions-- both in aggregate amount and individual donors-- they started coalescing around Shenna Bellows early on and have kept the momentum going. The usual Beltway pundits, prognosticators and naysayers were as negative as they always are when an extraordinary candidate raises her hand-- especially "her" hand-- and says she wants to run for office for all the right reasons. Here at DWT we started covering her uphill but inspiring race for the Maine Senate seat last November. Democrats and independents in Maine welcomed us aboard the little train that could. From Inside-the-Beltway we heard nothing but snickers. (You can contribute to her campaign here.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the DSCC, on the verge of losing the Senate and giving a ravenous and reactionary GOP control over the entire legislative branch, recognized that the key to keeping the Senate blue is Maine. Obama beat McCain there in 2008, 58-40% and beat Romney in 2012, 56--41%. But its probably the most independent-minded states in the country. The state Senate has 19 Democrats, 15 Republicans and 1 Independent and the state House is made up of 89 Democrats, 58 Republicans and 4 Independents. The power of the Independent candidate for governor in 2010 threw the election to one of the worst crackpot extremists anywhere in America, lunatic teabagger Paul LePage-- and it could happen again this year! The party registration numbers this year:

• Democrats- 297,445 (32.1%)
• Republicans- 258,464 (27.9%)
• Independents and others- 369,850 (40.0%)

Clearly, party-ID doesn't win elections in Maine. Republican Susan Collins has tried to paint herself as a moderate, but, clearly, she was never like Olympia Snowe, an actual moderate. She's a Republican through and through and, when push-comes-to-shove, especially in watering down progressive legislation and making it corporate-friendly, the Senate Republicans know they can count on her. When far right fanatic Rick Santorum said that Collins was, at heart, one of the nuts like himself, he wasn't just hoping it was true. Santorum said that Collins may vote moderate sometimes, but at least she is a team player who "always plays with the team and never plays against the conservative side even if she has to give the liberals a vote because she's from Maine." Yes, that's an apt description of Collins alright.

The DSCC isn't leading the way, but by finally endorsing Bellows, they are giving a green light to the Establishment to take a second look. Contributions were already good; they're accelerating now. And the media is paying attention as well. It isn't just blogs like this one, Crooks and Liars, Digby's and Daily Kos any more. ABC-TV did a feature on her and this morning Newsweek's ace reporter Dave Freedlander gave her the kind of wide coverage she needs to get her message out against an incumbent who first went to DC (as a staffer) in 1975… almost 40 years ago-- a year before Shenna was born! Freedlander began his post by comparing Shenna's appeal to Obama and JFK.

After a time as a field director at the American Civil Liberties Union office in Washington, D.C., Bellows returned to Maine. Leading the state office, she helped defeat a national ID-card requirement in the Maine legislature, setting off a wave of such defeats around the country; twice spearheaded a campaign to legalize same-sex marriage (losing once before winning in 2012); and successfully organized a bill that would require a warrant for law enforcement to access private cellphone communication.

And now her uphill battle against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins is generating the kind of buzz that Democrats need in what is supposed to be a difficult midterm-election year, and political analysts are wondering if her pitch points a way forward toward a politics of the future.

“I was honored to be called the Elizabeth Warren of civil liberties,” said Bellows in an interview in New York, where she had come for a fundraiser and a series of interviews. “I think it is really important that we stand up for civil liberties. Civil liberties is core to who we are as Americans. It is what unites us across background, across ideology. These core values in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are something that we all share and we need to get back to these fundamental freedoms.”

It is a pitch designed to not just attract a coalition of left and right, but to bring on board young people, who have a tendency to tune out politics, especially, in a non-presidential year.

Bellows is sounding all the Warrenesque Democratic populist notes on economic fairness, talking up student-loan debt, and her own backstory-- growing up in a house without indoor plumbing or electricity to a father who was a carpenter and a mother who was a home health aide and working herself as “Subway Sandwich Artist” to help pay her way through college. She talks a lot about climate change, too.

But the thrust of her pitch is about a government that is doing too much, or that is at least doing the wrong things. Not repairing roads and bridges so much as spying on its citizens and collecting their data. She is calling for a full repeal of the Patriot Act and massive curbs on the National Security Agency’s surveillance  programs. She wants marijuana legalized-- not just decriminalized or used for medical purposes-- and calls for full marriage equality in every state.

“What is new, what politicians haven’t done in the past is campaigned on marijuana legalization and stopping NSA spying,” she says, tugging awkwardly at the hem of her blue skirt suit. “And certainly I have highlighted my leadership on the same-sex marriage fight in Maine because I think that is an important part of my experience.”

This can be a complicated pitch. The NSA spying program especially was at least presided over by a Democratic administration, and there are certainly many Democrats who have been cool to marijuana legalization. At times, Bellows can sound like a spokesperson for the Ron Paul Army.

“I do think we need to limit government intrusion into people’s lives, absolutely. Whether it is the NSA or limitations on the freedom to love and marry the person that you want or intrusion into a women’s health-care choices.”

The marijuana piece of her platform, she says, comes not so much from a libertarian angle but from the side of justice and fairness.

“Look, I have never smoked marijuana. I am asthmatic, and I was always a straight-arrow kid in high school,” she said, karate chopping her nose to denote straight-arrowness. She once told this to a local prosecutor as she was lobbying him for reduced offenses for those arrested on drug crimes, and Bellows had to confess that she did not really know how much an ounce of pot was.

“And he laughed, and said, ‘Oh yeah, I used to smoke up all the time.’ But what struck me about this situation is here you have this prosecutor who is charged with incarcerating this activity that he himself has engaged in. It is an example of an unjust law that needs to change.”

To be clear, Bellows is not a millennial, but rather half a generation older. But no matter. Kennedy wasn’t a baby boomer either; rather, he was the way in which millions of them found their way into politics.

“The fact that she is making civil liberties a part of who she is to me is a signal to the millennial generation that she may not be one of them, but that she is one of them in spirit,” said John Della Volpe, the director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, where he regularly polls and focus groups millennials on their politics. “For a candidate to be successful, they need to develop a rapport with their constituents over a shared value system, and only once that happens can you have a discussion about politics and policy.”

…“Susan Collins was elected 18 years ago, when I was graduating from college,” Bellows told The Daily Beast. “And in those 18 years we have experienced an economic crisis and an environmental crisis and a constitutional crisis that threatens our country’s future. We are at an important point in our country’s history. We have some serious challenges that we can’t expect to overcome by staying with the status quo.”

Maine political observers say it is a smart pitch. It ties in Collins’ work with the Senate Intelligence Committee and plays into Bellows’ background with the Maine branch of the ACLU.  And highlighting her support for same-sex marriage contrasts with Collins’ moderate reputation. Bellows says that she tried to get Collins to join their coalition during the 2012 referendum fight, but that the senator refused to say where she stood on the issue.

Even Republican lawmakers in Maine had good things to say about Bellows’ tenure with the Maine ACLU. She was able, they say, to organize around key issues like the national ID card by reaching out to key members on both sides of the aisle, which took some of the partisan sting out of the issues. And she is pressing an aggressive campaign against Collins, trying to raise money from every town in the state (and outpacing her on fundraising in the last cycle, even if she trails in the money race overall) and speaking to groups that haven’t traditionally voted Democratic, like rural snowmobiling clubs, which she says, are greatly concerned about Washington overreach on spying.

Freedlander ended his piece on Bellows with a couple of her quotes that might not make sense Inside-the-Beltway, but are perfectly in tune with thinking in America: "I think the politics of the next generation will be a politics about principle rather than label. I am really excited to work on issues of civil liberties with Republicans like Rand Paul and Justin Amash. We need to build coalitions to advance positive social change." That's a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren bold progressive speaking. If it makes sense to you, please consider making a contribution to her campaign here. There is no donation that is too small, not today, not ever.