It's Lonely in The Middle

By Perry Bacon Jr.

Susan Collins had to change lunch tables. When the Maine Republican entered the Senate in 1997, she joined a group of five Republican moderates who lunched together every Wednesday. But one of them died in 1999, and in 2001 Vermont's Jim Jeffords fell out with the G.O.P. and became an independent. The lunch club got so small it soon disbanded, and Collins now occasionally eats with the Republican Steering Committee, a group of strongly conservative Republicans that has ballooned in membership. "I wanted to find out what they were saying and remind them of another view," Collins said.

If Collins, 52, is less lonely at lunch, she's still often looking for more G.O.P. allies when she votes. Today's U.S. Senate contains only four solidly moderate Republicans (Collins, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee, Maine's Olympia Snowe and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter). They increasingly face pressure from fellow Republicans to conform. But in a closely divided Senate, their votes can be determinative. Which is why G.O.P. Senators seeking to end judicial filibusters heavily courted Collins' vote as she remained uncommitted.

On an issue that splits her party between Senate traditionalists and newcomers, Collins is both and neither. A native of Caribou, Maine, she went straight out of college in 1975 to work as an aide to Republican Senator Bill Cohen. When he retired in 1996, Collins won his seat. While relatively new to the Senate, she doesn't share the strong conservatism of many of the chamber's younger Republicans. For instance, she has not supported George Bush's plan for personal-investment accounts as part of his Social Security reform.

Collins is moderate in more than just her votes: she's soft-spoken and even-keeled. She considers it a proud accomplishment that the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which she chairs, never had a vote that broke along party lines in its work on a bill last year that created a national intelligence director. But being a moderate, in her view, is not always a blessing. "It's difficult at times," Collins said. "I often envy my colleagues on the left and right for whom no vote is hard."