We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter (Olympia Snowe / NYT)

[struggle4progress]

... It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of “Survivor” — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you’re no longer welcome in the tribe ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/opinion/29snowe.html?_r=1

[Mz Pip]

1. Reagan is dead

So is the Republican Party.

The powers that be in the current GOP will not heed your words, Senator Snowe. If they thought they could pull it off in Maine, they would challenge you and Susan Collins with a RW tool in the Primary.

[vixengrl]

2. It might be meaningful to note that conservative commentator Ramesh

Ponnura has said that Sens Snowe and Collins should be the next ones voted off the island.

[aquart]

3. And I say to him, "Go for it!"

Let their dear party do to them what its done to the rest of the country.

[DonCoquixote]

4. I hate to sound mean and sexist

But reading this reminds me of "battered wife" syndrome where a spouse knows that her no good bum of a hubby will continue to beat her, yet the spouse still keeps trying to save him. Snowe, the GOP did not care then, and it does not care now.

[MADem]

7. She was a Republican when Martin Luther King was a Republican.

And for the same reasons that he was one.

She's one of the New England types....she just "overlooked" all of that "baiting" the rest of the party was doing because none of it was an issue in her neck of the woods.

I think she's positioning herself as an Elder Stateswoman in a party that she hopes will rise from the ashes. Unless we screw up, though, she won't get that gig.

[napoleon_in_rags]

5. Oh yeah, Snowe is definitely next to get voted off. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muZ96HDCUSE&feature=related

Watch the video enough to get the gist of her commentary (saying we need to confront global warming) but then look at the comments:

Typical moronic RINO. This woman aligns herself with Boxer and claims to be a republican? What a phony.

This is bullshit. She drank the kool-aid and is buying into it like a mindless fool.

The conservative here represents the norm for that party. They think of her like a traitor.

[MADem]

6. This IS a road map to the GOP future, assuming the party survives.

They've got to get rid of that Xtian God (yay), Other gods (boo), Guns (yay), Gays (boo), Choice (boo), white folks (yay), "other" folks (boo), set of attitudes they have working. They've got to not just "make their pie higher" they also have to make it bigger. This is the same stuff McCain's kid is saying. It'll be a long time before this happens, but if we get smug and shitty (like they did) it will happen. We have to keep our eyes on the prize, and not get involved in peripheral or "niche" adventures ourselves--we've got to learn from their mistakes.

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.