Twelve Maine Republicans resigned their party positions and un-enrolled from their party this week with a dramatic flourish, sending a letter to the Maine GOP that made the press.
The letter made a splash in part because of its higher profile signatories, and in part due to the glee Republican opponents take in pointing out fissures in the Grand Old Party.
In this case Republicans wrote the letter, but Maine Democrats shouldn’t feel too smug. Progressive Democrats could just as easily pen a drop-dead letter of their own citing their party’s coziness with big business, the failure of the Democratic Legislature to overturn Governor LePage’s vetoes, and President Obama’s tacit endorsement of everything they hated about the most recent President Bush.
The Republican group included one Lincoln County resident, Greg Hodge, of Jefferson. Without commenting on the specifics of the letter, we can assert Hodge and people like him are vital to the party’s long-term health.
Hodge is a boots-on-the-ground guy; the partisan willing to invest his time attending meetings, knocking on doors, handing out fliers, gathering petitions, engaging neighbors in conversations, and, in Hodge’s case specifically, moseying on up to Augusta now and again to follow legislation he is interested in.
Big names – Obama, Palin, Romney – may move the needle so to speak, but it is men and women like Greg Hodge that truly make a party go. Losing people like Hodge is bad for the long-term health of any cause.
Of course, the flip side is a big, so what? So you resigned from one of the two political parties in America that have a hand in everything, and to do what, exactly? To become an independent voter? There are lots of them already and they generally end up voting for the party closest to their ideals.
In a binary system, it’s one or the other. That’s how we got to where we are now.
The brutal truth is, there is little place in America for a disenchanted political animal to go.
It is apparent, however, the system we have is at a nadir. We essentially have two political parties, each beholden to their own special interests and big money donors to the point of paralysis, and each increasingly looking and acting more like the other by the day.
The real message is in the letter’s bottom line: “we here in the trenches are not being heard.” As Hodge himself did this week, why not resign? The Republican Party isn’t listening to him now so what difference does it make?
We admire the principle involved. It might be a good idea if Americans un-enrolled from the major political parties en masse. We don’t know what, if anything, would change, but we are starting to think we would like to see it.
