One Woman’s Observation of Sen. Olympia Snowe
Former Republican Maine Senator Olympia Snowe is one for the books. She was orphaned as a child, widowed at 26, yet was elected to Congress at the ripe, old age of 31.
She had a decade-long courtship with Jock McKernan, during the time they both served in Congress together for the state of Maine. They married while she was still a member of Congress and he, was by then, the governor of Maine…making Olympia Snowe the first woman to be both a First Lady and a Congresswoman.
Sen. Snowe went on to be elected to the Senate serving Maine as Senator for 18 years. She announced last year that she wouldn’t run again because frankly, she couldn’t stomach Congress any longer.
“There use to be a time when there wasn’t so much partisan rancor,” Snowe wrote in her upcoming book about Congress, and “it doesn’t have to be this way…governing or lack of governing by brinkmanship, deferral and deadline.”
Sen. Snowe said it best when she wrote, “I’m a fighter and a survivor and I used those traits to champion what I believed in.”
Well said, Senator. We’ll miss you.
Written by LaDonna Hale Curzon
