VINALHAVEN – My folks were Republicans, as were my closest grandparents, who lived a stone’s throw away right here in my island home.

Gramp died of a heart attack while leading the Fourth of July parade. At the time, he was standing at attention and saluting the flag. I grew up fully acquainted with particular values, principles that I’m as comfortable with today as I was then.

At the time, I thought those were Republican values. Now, I’m not sure. Maybe they were just human values and I associated them with being Republican. Certainly capitalism was front and center, a valued and encouraged freedom. So were a small government and a strong military.

I still believe in those things but am hard-pressed to find other Republicans, certainly not in the public arena, whose principles have not become bizarrely skewed and whose capacity for even measured consideration of the issues or opposing views is in working order.

An exception was certainly Olympia Snowe, and with her gone I’m going to find it even harder to cling to my political identity.

I’ve complained about the tiresome, unproductive, dogmatic extremism that finds most of our elected officials careening along in the breakdown lane and only two Maine senators and a handful of others — not enough to make a difference — now and then carpooling sensibly down the middle of the road, not exceeding the speed limit and keeping an eye on the other crazies behind the wheel.

Ours is the only state that is represented in the Senate by two Republican women. Since 1997, they have been consistent voices, not as much of moderation as of common sense.

When nearly everyone else in Congress has for too long been willing to stonewall and filibuster anything that came down the pike, regardless of redeeming value, just to make sure that the president — whoever he is or was — can’t end a term in office having claimed credit for anything, our two senators argued for practical solutions, for compromise, for at least getting something done.

During that period when I thought I was absorbing Republican values, we were applauding Edmund Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith simultaneously. They were a great team, even on opposite sides of the fence.

Democrat Muskie’s ideas of good government were often not ours, but he was hard to hate.

He was honest, sensitive to the realities that were the lives of his constituents here in Maine, believed in what the Democratic Party stood for but was aware that good government emerges from accommodation, good leadership from compromise. (He also forgave me for having chucked a cherry bomb in his direction while he was addressing folks here on the island in 1960.)

I shudder to think of the degree to which the Republican Party’s capacity for common sense and thoughtful deliberation will be diminished by Olympia Snowe’s departure and am braced against the likelihood that Maine Republicans will choose someone of lesser character to replace her.

Last week, the chairman of my Knox County Republicans sent out a frantic alert to the faithful under the banner “This Picture Should Stun You.” It was a photo of President Obama carrying a book, the title of which was blown up for our flabbergasted consideration.

The book was “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria, an American academic of Indian descent and once an enthusiastic supporter of Ronald Reagan. The implication of the alert, clearly stated in a subsequent exchange between the chairman and myself, was that Obama was interested in establishing a socialist state and that this kind of reading material was clear evidence of his interest in hastening that process.

Other zealots have frantically described Zakaria as a Muslim and characterize Obama’s interest in the book as evidence of his intent to engineer a Muslim takeover of America.

The fact that Zakaria’s thoughtful book describes the inherent dangers to America’s standing in the world likely to result from our having aggressively helped the spread of democracy is of no importance to those to whom nothing matters but appearances, to whom nothing is as appealing as slander and to whom common sense is abhorrent. We will not find Olympia Snowe among those scary people.

Phil Crossman of Vinalhaven is a writer and innkeeper.

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