Collins gets October surprise

Collins gets October surprise

BILL NEMITZ
October 21, 2008

She's been around politics long enough to know that this is the time in a campaign when you're most apt to get blindsided.

But not even Sen. Susan Collins could have predicted that, with just two weeks to go before Election Day, she'd be in a highly publicized spat with ... Sen. John McCain?

"These kinds of tactics don't work in Maine," Kevin Kelley, Collins' spokesman, said Monday, referring to the McCain campaign's "robo-calls" that have caused a furor in several states, including Maine, since late last week.

The calls, dialed automatically to households all over the state, contain a 28-second message claiming that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama "has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans."

Of course, as most voters know by now, the GOP has yet to produce any evidence showing that Obama and Ayers were more than casual acquaintances when their paths crossed in the early 1990s.

And as the Associated Press pointed out over the weekend, the aforementioned bombings by Ayers' Weather Underground 35 years ago caused no fatalities. (Nor, the AP reported, did the group ever claim responsibility for the attack on the judge's home.)

But back to Collins. According to Kelley, she first heard about the calls Friday afternoon – around the same time the Maine Democratic Party called on her to resign as Maine co-chair of McCain's campaign.

The Dems also called on Collins to seek the resignation of Mark Ellis, executive director of the Maine Republican Party, for a mailer the state party put out last week – again linking Obama and Ayers as "close friends."

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=217159&ac=PHnws

I hope this can stick to her.

Her failure to do so indicates her dedication to party above that to her principles and state.

I see CommonCents is out in force on the comments on that article.