Horace Hildreth ran the first Maine political ad on television.

It didn’t hurt that the GOP gubernatorial candidate owned a TV station.

The year was 1958.

“Aim high with Hildreth,” the ad said. It showed a cartoon rocket blasting off.

Hildreth lost to Clinton Clauson.

Too bad the idea of mixing politics with the boob tube didn’t stop there.

The first campaign I covered was Margaret Chase Smith’s swan song. The closest thing to a “negative” barb came during the GOP primary when Bob Monks, then a very rich young guy, sent a messenger with 74 birthday roses onto the U.S. Senate floor to make an issue of Mrs. Smith’s age. Smith ran no television ads. She raised only a few thousand bucks — none from PACs or special interest groups.

Bill Hathaway, the Democrat who upset Mrs. Smith in the fall campaign, did go on television. The low-budget ads showed Hathaway behind the wheel of his car, driving around Maine and talking about the state’s problems. There were no double-entendres about Smith’s age.

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?

The AFL-CIO did a yearlong million-dollar ax job on Republican Rep. Jim Longley, which looks like it’s going to work. Bob Monks and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hired investigators to dig up dirt on their opponents. The biggest political story of 1996 centered on rumors — unproven — that GOP U.S. Senate candidate John Hathaway had sex with a 12-year-old baby sitter.

At the national level, both major parties have put For Sale signs on their candidates. A major scandal is brewing after reports that the White House solicited illegal contributions from an Indonesian banking cartel.

Closer to home, Canadian-owned Irving Oil Co. contributed at least $100,000 in the referendum effort to defeat the Maine Green Party’s clear-cutting ban. Other Canadian corporations kicked in an additional $100,000, according to state campaign expenditure reports. Company spokesman Steve Glidden confirmed that Irving included a notice in the pay envelope of the firm’s several hundred Maine employees last week urging them to vote for Gov. King’s 2B alternative that would permit clear-cutting under some new restrictions. Irving owns 2 million acres of Maine timberland and scores of gas stations and convenience stores across the state.

Green Party organizers said the pay envelope notice smacked of intimidation and questioned the propriety of foreign-owned corporations involving themselves in a local political issue. Glidden said the mailing was a “relatively benign” informational pamphlet that stated the company’s position on clear-cutting to employees.

Sen. Bill Cohen, while on a panel sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford Foundation last month, predicted that public outrage over the stinking smell oozing this year from election finances could hit a combustible temperature and ignite a serious third party movement. The last time American politics was turned upside down like that came just before the Civil War, when Northern voters fed up with slavery joined a splinter group called the Republican Party and seized control of the federal government.

There are indications that public discontent over the way special interests dominate elections has reached the boiling point. Maine and four other states will vote Tuesday on referendum proposals to rein in the influence of big money. Maine’s plan is the toughest. It would offer legislative and gubernatorial candidates the option of partial public financing if they agreed to abide by spending restrictions. The most recent Bangor Daily News-Mason-Dixon poll found that nearly 60 percent of state voters support the proposal.

The latest NEWS survey showed a drop during the past two weeks in President Clinton’s lead and “favorable” polling numbers after revelations about the Indonesian money. In the same period the percentage of Mainers backing Ross Perot, a campaign finance critic, doubled.

I suspect support for Ralph Nader, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, also has risen. Nader’s criticism of special interest influence on elections predates Perot. Nader is not listed in the NEWS and most other polls because he’s on the ballot in only 22 states.

Joining Perot and Nader on Maine’s Nov. 5 ballot are Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party, John Hagelin of the Natural Law Party and Howard Phillips of the U.S. Taxpayers Party. All of the fringe party presidential candidates favor differing approaches to the nation’s problems. But they agree the major parties have been corrupted by special interest money.

Nancy Allen, a Maine Green Party organizer, thinks a consensus could be forged among the fringe parties to force a national referendum on the issue of campaign reform. The idea calls for a coalition of splinter parties and grass-roots organizations like Common Cause to collect signatures in all the states during the 1998 elections to force referendums similar to Maine’s on campaign reform. Allen said she will make the proposal during a post-election meeting of U.S. Green Parties at Middleburg, Va., later this month. The goal would be shorter elections; an elimination of PACs; free air time to candidates; the end of independent expenditure campaigns; and a system that provides optional public funding for candidates who accept spending restrictions.

That kind of coordinated effort, Allen said, might shame Congress and the White House into getting off their butts and changing the corrupt existing system. That’s something President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich promised to do a year ago in New Hampshire. But both conveniently forgot the pledge when their parties began trolling for the millions needed to finance their attack ads.

Not a bad idea going “Back to the Future,” when candidates like Margaret Chase Smith and Bill Hathaway ran low-budget, positive campaigns that didn’t embarrass the voters. — COPLIN PLANTATION