A Word with Mr. Kornacki

If you have a moment to slip outside the War Room, Steve, I'd like to address a most intriguing paragraph you wrote in today's Salon.com article, "Olympia Snowe's huge gift to Democrats" You reiterate Sen. Snowe's statement as to why she is stepping down: “Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term. So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.” Your interpretation of her words begins: The charitable way to read [Sen. Snowe's statement] is that Snowe is tired of pretending to be more outraged by the Obama administration and Democrats in general than she actually is and that she’d rather retire than keep catering to the Tea Party. More realistically, she just honestly believes that D.C.’s current polarized condition is equally the fault of both parties. Again, if she really wanted to work across the aisle and with the White House more, she probably could have, because of the option of an independent reelection candidacy. Yet your very next sentence begins: But even if she wasn’t particularly helpful to them these past few years, Snowe is doing Democrats a huge favor now. May I suggest that your "charitable" reading of Sen. Snow's statement is the exact meaning she had in mind to deliver. She is known to be a centrist. If anything, that jump in the American Conservative Union rating from 48 in 2009 to 64 in 2010 says a lot about the brow beating she has taken from her party in the last two years. The soup from which you draw the idea that she is equally fed up with the polarization of both parties is as thin and insubstantial as the intellectual tea that suckers those Senators who vote according to its precepts. I notice you offer us no example of Democrats polarizing to damage the legislative process, while we have only to turn on the TV evening news...after evening after evening, to learn how the Republican side of both aisles of both houses have voted en bloc to stop passage of a bill, after a bill, etc. What you do is hurry into another sentence: a sentence projecting your own ideas of what Sen. Snowe COULD do...if she were not utterly beaten down by what she has been through this past year; indeed, if she did not already have a decent plan for follow-through...the very plan you stated first in your thoughtless meanderings in and about Sen. Snowe's dynamics. The one thing you have overlooked...the one plausible possibility, Mr. Kornacki, is that Sen. Snowe has set up the election cycle to go exactly the way she wants it to go. A thought very much worth considering... Yes, time for you...and me...to be on our ways.