enlarge The Associated Press

Sen. Olympia Snowe says she’s working hard on health care because in all her years of political life, “I can’t recall an issue that has so mattered with every person I’ve encountered.”

What a book this would – and perhaps someday will – make.

Wherever she goes, whatever she says, however she says it, Sen. Olympia Snowe lives these days under a national microscope.

As the debate over health care reform moves into the sausage-making stage – in go at least four reform bills, out will come one – we see Snowe cited here, there and everywhere as the one person in Congress, in the country for that matter, who might single-handedly decide what comes out of the sausage maker (and what doesn't).

Some, particularly those to the right who have long lambasted Snowe as a RINO (Republican in Name Only), say she should be ashamed of herself. (These same folks are no doubt the reason that calls to the main line at Snowe's Washington, D.C., office Thursday morning were greeted by a recorded message stating the senator's voice mailbox is "currently full.")

But as someone who has watched Snowe navigate the nation's political currents for the past three decades, I've never been more impressed with her courage and, at a time when it's sorely needed, her leadership.

Nor have I been more certain, as Snowe sits through daily 12-hour "markup sessions" on the reform bill now before the Senate Finance Committee, as she keeps talking to the majority Democrats long after many of her GOP colleagues have retreated to the cable-TV scream-fests, as she doggedly puts the public good above partisan sniping, that yet another Maine political legacy is being written before our eyes.

For Margaret Chase Smith, it was the "Declaration of Conscience" speech in 1950 that turned the tide against the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. "Moscow Maggie," as McCarthy sneeringly called her, would go on to earn the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989 from President George H.W. Bush.

For Ed Muskie, it was the very planet we live on. Sure, he failed in his bid for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, but Muskie's efforts to clean our polluted air and water are at the very root of what we now call environmental protection.

For Bill Cohen, it was that signature moment in 1974 when, as a Republican freshman on the House Judiciary Committee, he broke with his party and voted to impeach President Richard Nixon.

For George Mitchell, it was the day he looked Lt. Col. Oliver North in the eye during a congressional hearing on the Iran-Contra scandal and taught him a thing or two about what it means to "love one's country." More significantly, it was the day when Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland went to the polls and together embraced the Good Friday Agreement brokered by the former senator from Maine.

Now, as the chess game plays out beneath the U.S. Capitol dome, it appears to be Snowe's turn.

Some might argue that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's appointment Thursday of Paul Kirk to fill the seat of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy provides – with or without Snowe – the much-needed 60 votes to thwart any Republican filibuster of an eventual health reform bill.

But others point to the ailing Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and occasionally wavering Democrats like Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, and predict that Snowe's vote, in the end, will prove pivotal.

"It's my Greek destiny," Snowe joked in a telephone interview between committee deliberations Thursday afternoon. "Where there were many, now there are few. And in this instance, with my placement on the (finance) committee, there's one."

To be sure, Snowe said, it's a dizzying time to be at the center of a political maelstrom that, but for her, would have no center at all.

But it's not the politics of the moment that propel her, she said. Rather, it's her determination to remain "grounded" in what has become the dominant domestic issue of our time.

In all her years of political life, Snowe said, "I can't recall an issue that has so mattered...