“To me, it’s not about titles or roles: it’s doing what’s right, whether that’s working with Republicans or Democrats,” she told Margarita Pournara in our cover story. “It’s considering each bill or proposal and determining whether this was the right way to address a particular problem…The answer begins with resoluteness. It involves cooperation. It understands bipartisanship. And it ends with leadership.”
Her brand of leadership, often a lonely road, has made this country great, has made any democracy great, and always comes with perils. They exiled Aristides from ancient Athens for acting on his conscience and Sen. Snowe was pilloried here by the various jackals in and out of office for her typical democratic (with a small “d”) bipartisanship on health care reform in what is, after all, still a democratic forum. But that doesn’t deter her and which, of course, is very much in character.
“The reality that the status quo is unacceptable was what originally brought six of us together on the Senate Finance Committee last summer in the only bipartisan effort in any committee of the House or Senate,” she says.
And now that health care reform is law, she has, in typical fashion, moved on to making it better and making sense of it for her constituents. “Today, we still don’t have answers to some of the most fundamental questions that people will be asking at their kitchen tables,” she says. “These are the critical questions relevant to peoples’ daily lives, such as, what does this mean for me? How much will my health insurance plan cost? How much will my deductible or my co-pay be? How much am I going to have to pay out of my pocket? Not one single member in Congress–-Republican or Democrat-- can answer those questions.”
She, of course, will try, as she always has, as she always sees it her duty to try for her constituents, and for her conscience, which has become a rare commodity in our often-fractious democratic process.
Speaking of fractious, the travails in Greece have also roiled our passions here, of course. It’s disturbing to see the country we love so much going through such upheaval and suffering. It’s disturbing to see her being singled out for her penury. It’s even more disturbing to see the riots in the street and the loss of life. Greeks have always been a proud and passionate people: passionate in their beliefs, passionate in their emotions, passionate in their actions. It’s been our strength and sometimes our undoing. We wish our homeland well in these difficult times, and we wish her a speedy recovery. Nothing is tougher, we know, than the Greek people, who found inspiration and nourishment even in the unforgiving Greek soil.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
The good people of Maine knew they had a good thing when they first elected Olympia Snowe to her senate seat: she not only came up the hard way like many of them (overcoming both poverty and the many tragedies in her life), but these hardships seasoned and made her something of a rarity in the current Senate: a thoughtful senator whose decisions are often based on good sense and the good of the country rather than the agenda of any interest group or political party. 
