BELFAST — Campaigning here, U.S. Rep. Olympia J. Snowe couldn’t have been more at home if she were sitting in the Blaine House living room.

This coastal town is about as Republican as Republican gets. Voters here haven’t even considered a Democrat since it handed former Gov. Joseph E. Brennan three of its five wards a decade ago. In 1990, Snowe whipped Democratic challenger Patrick K. McGowan in Belfast by nearly 400 votes.

And so it was as Snowe returned to Belfast to get a pat — that’s small “p” — on the back from supporters as she heads into the campaign’s waning days.

It was cozy stuff in the Shrine building. John Desco, an old hand at GOP campaigns, was sure to tell Snowe that he had pounded in her signs himself. But, well, some Democrat just came along in the night and whisked them away.

A 12-point buck — just the head, actually — loomed over the Rotarians as they sat down to sup and sing. “No. 13!, No. 13!” rang out as the weekly lottery was drawn, competing with a chorus of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

“Our first visiting Rotarian,” one man said, taking care of some housekeeping, “is the chairman of the Democratic ….”

Forks stopped clanking. A little joke, there, he explained. Heh, heh.

And the guy sitting next to retiring state Rep. Francis Marsano, the minority leader, quipped, “Francis has allowed me to say that he and Pat McGowan have one thing in common this year — neither one’s going to be elected to office.”

They chuckled at that but roared when Snowe told of one of her colleagues, a congressman from New York who broadcasts this year that he’s “running for Congress” rather than for re-election, just to escape that anti-incumbent stuff out there. That was until he ran into a wag who replied, “Well, you’ve gotta be better than the guy who’s in there now.”

Snowe went through her stump speech — yes, we need change, but we need it from within the Congress and from someone with influence. When she called for a line-item veto for the president, you’d have thought Ronald Reagan walked into the room.

And, as with other groups, the Rotarians got a kick out of her line about McGowan calling the balanced-budget amendment a gimmick: “If it was a gimmick, Congress would have passed it.”

That easy-going, I’m-a-Republican-you’re-a-Republican camaraderie ended by the time Snowe got to Bangor, when she held a news conference to counter McGowan’s new charge that her 1983 vote for the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which helped Central and South American countries export goods to the United States duty free, cost Maine 10,000 shoe and textile jobs.

But Snowe pointed out that shoes and textiles were exempt from the law, thanks in part to her lobbying. Well, said McGowan, the government still provided funds to those countries to help them lure U.S. firms. O.K that’s true, Snowe rebutted, adding that she fought to strip the money from the program that provided those incentives because it skirted the law.

Then, the McGowan camp said that was after the fact and didn’t count, and proceeded to air a television spot about the vote.

And so they went on, the Snowe and McGowan campaigns, arguing over which candidate REALLY stands for jobs, and who’s distorting whose record.