In 2000, Democratic state Sen. Mark Lawrence ran a mostly polite, issues-oriented campaign against Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe. He was pounded at the polls. This year, former Democratic state Sen. Chellie Pingree is running a less polite, more personal campaign against Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. It is too soon to say whether this strategy will work, but it is already clear that the campaign will do more to confuse than enlighten voters.

The challenge for Democrats is to show in areas that matter to Mainers – health care, education, the environment – their candidate is sufficiently different from the moderate Republican in office. The Lawrence campaign never did figure out how to do that; the Pingree campaign is mistaking accusations, some plain wrong, for distinctions over policy.

For instance, state Sen. Pingree’s major claim is championing the Maine Rx program, which provides lower-cost drugs to Maine. She wants this model to be used nationally. Sen. Collins wrote to the attorney general in support of the Maine Rx program when the proposal drew pharmaceutical lawyers after being passed and has said she would like to see it work at the state level before applying on the federal level. There is a difference in these two positions but, as Democratic strategists no doubt understand, it is not an interesting difference.

So what can the party do to help the Pingree campaign? “Since 1997, Collins has voted nine times against creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit,” it announced the other day. That sent Collins campaign workers to their data banks to review the votes, one of which was an amendment that would have prohibited tax reform on the marriage penalty until a drug benefit was in place, another of which had a premium cost so high even AARP wasn’t interested, a third was on a procedural vote on a motion by Sen. Robert Byrd that even many Democrats did not support, and so forth.

When asked for a list of occasions when Sen. Collins did support a prescription drug benefit, Democrats didn’t have it, “frankly, because our interest is in showing that she’s opposed the benefit a number of times,” according to one staffer. Fair enough in a political race, but not very informative.

This began last December when the Democratic Party accused the Collins campaign with failing to disclose contributions, which turned out to be a mistaken reading of her campaign filings. Then in February Republicans were pleased to announce Ms. Pingree had a large outside political action committee accepting soft money, a first for Maine. The Dems say she needs it to fight the pharmaceutical lobby that may or may not campaign against her. The sniping goes on: One gets campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies; the other candidate gets dividends.

Democrats have now accused Sen. Collins of working against the interests of Mainers on education and the environment, even as she worked closely with the Maine Department of Education on the major education reform passed not long ago and Maine environmental groups can’t stop praising her work. Evidence that the Dems are shooting blanks on this point was made comically clear with a party press release last week that attempted to counter the senator’s claim to be moderate and independent by asserting that she “votes with Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond, and the Republican leadership nearly 80 percent of the time.” That means, of course, that she votes in opposition more than 20 percent of the time, a record that pretty much defines moderation and independence.

None of this leads anywhere toward informing Maine voters about whatever substantial differences there are between candidates. Instead, it leads to slicing issues ever finer in an attempt to find some unflattering detail about an opponent. For a state in economic trouble so desperate that it struggles to pay the health care costs of its older citizens, can no longer keep many of its young workers while watching its manufacturing base collapse, that is far from good enough.