Susan Collins arrived at the debate with two numbers: she voted with Joe Biden 91% of the time, and she has opposed Donald Trump 137 times this Congress. They are meant to show independence. They show something else, which is how cheaply a senator can buy a reputation for it.
A count of votes treats every vote as equal. They are not. The vote that decides what a Senate does is the first one, on who runs it. Collins votes for a Republican leader, and that gives the majority control of the calendar, the committees, and which bills reach the floor and which die. She can dissent 137 times on measures that pass or fail without her. Her seat is what turns the other 99 senators' preferences into an agenda. Her critique of the Iran operation as poorly planned follows the same pattern. It is a complaint about execution, from someone whose party has made it easy to wage war without Congress having to take responsibility. Her warning that tariffs on Canada would hurt Maine is accurate. But the people who impose those tariffs are the people she helps keep in power, and Maine's border towns pay for that arrangement whether or not she objects.
That is the argument Troy Jackson should be making, and in the exchange reported here he gave Collins an easy way to change the subject.
Jackson's appeal rests on a particular credibility. He is a logger from the north woods who has spent his career telling Augusta that lobbyists and corporate money bend the rules against working people. When he was asked about corporate contributions to the political committee he led as Senate president, he said he could not stop the committee from taking them. That answer will not hold. A leader is the person who decides what a committee can do. "The rules allowed it" is the defense every incumbent offers for every arrangement a reformer is supposed to oppose. Leadership committees are legal, common in both parties, and a symptom of a campaign finance system that corrupts by routine rather than by scandal. That is the answer Jackson should have given: he played by the rules he inherited, he now sees what they do, and here is what he would change. Instead he sounded like a man claiming he was not in the room.
The questions about his son's lobbying work and about whether Jackson changed positions on related issues are murkier. Collins made allegations, and the debate reporting does not establish them. But a candidate who has run against lobbyists will always be asked about the one in his own family. The test is whether he can explain plainly where the line was and who was on which side of it.
The left should not wave this away. Collins has taken donations from industries with business before her committees for decades, and she has no standing to lecture anyone about money. But that is a reason to press her, not a reason to excuse a weak answer from the candidate who is supposed to be the alternative. An anti-corruption message works only if the messenger is cleaner than the thing he attacks. Otherwise it becomes one more claim that everybody is compromised, and that claim favors the incumbent.
The contest should turn on who holds power in the Senate and what it does with it. Collins has made an artful career of voting against the worst outcomes while preserving the structure that produces them. Jackson can make that case only if he stops treating questions about his own committee as an inconvenience and answers them in full.
