A Little Context
Footnotes to the Absurd
During her first U.S. Senate campaign in 1996, Susan Collins pledged to serve only two terms. In a televised debate, she said: “I have pledged that if I’m elected, I will only serve two terms.” That meant twelve years, not an open-ended stay in Washington.
On February 10, 2026, Collins formally announced her campaign for a sixth term. She has previously defended abandoning her self-imposed limit by arguing that she underestimated the importance of seniority in helping Maine. What began as a promise to leave after two terms has become a case for staying because of the experience accumulated along the way.
The cartoon turns that promise into an elastic measuring tape, stretched from “TWO TERMS” toward “SIXTH TERM.” Her line about flexibility and the President is invented satirical dialogue, not an actual Collins quotation.
The point isn’t that politicians can never change their minds. It’s that a firm limit becomes a very different promise when the person who made it keeps moving the endpoint.
Read the Portland Press Herald’s reporting on the original pledge and Collins’s explanation.
Read the sixth-term announcement on Collins’s campaign website.