AUGUSTA – U.S. Sen. Susan M. Collins deplored what she characterized Tuesday as “distortions” of her political record by Democratic leaders speaking at the party’s state convention last weekend.

Defending Collins’ first re-election effort against a challenge by former state Senate Majority Leader Chellie Pingree, D-North Haven, spokeswoman Felicia Knight said the senator’s voting record on the collapse of the Enron corporation had been misrepresented.

During the convention’s Friday evening events, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee claimed the Bangor Republican had voted against an investigation of the Enron corporation. The next day, while outlining why she should be elected to the U.S. Senate, Pingree promised to stay on the side of working people and small businesses, “not big corporations like Enron who will ship our jobs to other places and then want to shelter their taxes overseas.”

Although some at the convention linked Pingree’s Enron reference to McAuliffe’s remarks and the Collins’ vote, Deborah Reed, the Democratic candidate’s campaign manager, insisted Tuesday that Pingree was simply using Enron as an example of business practices she would never support. There was, she said, no intentional attempt to link the Enron reference with what Collins’ perceived as McAuliffe’s factual distortion.

But Christy Setzer, communications director for the Maine Democratic Party, maintained Tuesday there was nothing distorted about Collins’ vote against seeking subpoenas for White House officials with possible connections to Enron. Instead, Setzer said Collins was simply trying to “protect the Washington Republican establishment.”

“She was voting for a delay,” Setzer said. “She was voting to frustrate the investigation and that is simply wrong for a senator to vote for a delay that puts the interests of big corporations and the White House above the interests of hardworking people who have seen their retirement savings disappear. … Sen. Collins voted to let Enron and the Washington establishment off the hook.”

Collins is a member of the Governmental Affairs Committee and the ranking Republican on that panel’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Knight said the subcommittee already has issued nearly 60 subpoenas in the Enron investigation that were fully supported by Collins who, she said, supports an Enron investigation.

Responding to those subpoenas Monday, the White House gave the Governmental Affairs Committee access to more than 2,100 pages of documents related to contacts with Enron officials. No instance has been found so far of Enron officials asking anyone in the White House for help before the company’s bankruptcy last December, according to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

Although the U.S. Senate has yet to cast any votes on Enron, the Governmental Affairs Committee voted May 22 on whether to subpoena documents from the White House. Knight said Collins voted against issuing subpoenas – at that time – because the committee had received a letter from White House counsel saying that the documents were forthcoming. Some of the documents, Knight said, were received the day of the vote.

“Senator Collins’ opinion was that since the White House was cooperating in supplying documents, the committee should wait and see if the documents complied with the request before taking the subpoena route,” Knight said.

Collins’ spokeswoman insisted that her boss had a “very clear record of accomplishment” and that the negative remarks made at the Democratic convention were part of a “persistent effort by the Maine Democratic Party and the Pingree campaign.”

“It’s an unfortunate campaign tactic,” Knight said. “Instead of telling voters what they want to tell them about their candidate, they instead try to distort the record of the opposition. But we’ve come to expect that from them.”