Primary, less one

New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith is giving up his GOP membership in order to run for president with an “I” next to his name. The “I,” unfortunately, is likely to stand not for independent but for irrelevant.

Sen. Smith, like anyone else, is of course free to run under any banner he chooses, but his reasons for leaving the Republicans defy not only the concept of the centrist Big Tent theory of party-building, but also the conservative pup-tent theory of the far right. And there’s no telling how disappointed his constituents, who thought they were voting for a guy in the political majority, feel now that he belongs to the Just Me Party.

His platform, he announced Tuesday, will remain unchanged: “It’s pro-life, it’s pro-Second Amendment, it’s pro-military, it’s pro-sovereignty, it’s pro-character and integrity.” The presumed leaders in the GOP presidential primary race, he concluded, do not properly represent these ideas, and it is difficult to disagree with him on that.

Democrats experienced this same problem with Bill Clinton in ’92. They finally get a Democrat in office and what do they have but a welfare-ending, pro-death penalty, free-trader who had an annoying habit of finding good Republican ideas and adopting them as his own. That made him terribly unpopular with Democrats in Congress but, in the era of a strong economy, the public was willing to support him and forgive him almost anything. George W. Bush apparently has learned that lesson of governing from the middle and so has Elizabeth Dole.

Sen. Smith would in no way diminish his ideas by admitting that they are not an integral part of his party’s platform but that he is trying to change this. Doing so would leave the party intact and leave him with a voice in it. Otherwise he becomes a Robert Reich-figure, President Clinton’s former labor secretary who left his job in frustration after President Clinton kept agreeing with the GOP. Gone and largely forgotten.

Further, there is something defeatist about a candidate who announces a primary run then quits his party before the first primary vote is cast. It suggests a real lack of faith not in the leaders of the party but in the voters. Especially at the start of a campaign, that’s not a group to offend.