The phrase “new Democrats” generally means centrist, or the political movement led by Bill Clinton away from his party’s liberal heritage hewn by “old Democrats.” Obviously, it has been a winning strategy.

Although now disdained, old Democrats have a proud heritage. They were, given recent evidence, far more likely to put country above party. Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy broke with their president over Vietnam. Hubert Humphrey denounced Dixie Democrats for opposing civil right laws benefiting minorities.

Impeachment fathered a new breed of Democrat. For them, no deed or alleged crime by their president was beyond the pale. In the end, every Democratic senator put Clinton above country.

The recount in Florida has elevated the new Democratic political game to a higher partisan level. It’s always been true that entrenched partisans of either party could steal an election. Republican Rutherford Hayes blatantly snatched the White House from Democrat Samuel Tilden in 1876. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is said to have manufactured enough votes to elect John Kennedy in 1960.

These days, new Democrats seem to have put the lawyer-driven Florida recount election of Al Gore above America. And things aren’t stopping with the recount. There are charges that a Democratic operative is digging up dirt on Republican electors and has posted their names and telephone numbers on an Internet site to pressure them into breaking their pre-election pledge to vote for George W. Bush.

These are the kind of tactics an old Democrat would say is un-American. The rest of this column is about an “old” Democrat named Edmund S. Muskie. The 1968 presidential election began with Chicago policemen beating up anti-war protesters while Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey and Muskie to challenge Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. It was one of the most bitter and closely contested elections in this century. The country needed to come together quickly.

Ed Muskie had advocated elimination of the Electoral College in favor of the presidency being decided by popular vote. That said, the Electoral College was the rule of the land on Dec. 16, 1968, when Dr. Lloyd Bailey of Rocky Mount, N.C., a Republican elector pledged to the Nixon-Agnew ticket, cast his ballot for independent George Wallace. In a rambling letter, Bailey criticized Nixon for including “un-Americans” like Henry Kissinger on his foreign policy team. One might assume that Dr. Bailey was a Republican problem.

It was Muskie, though, who concluded that an electoral vote taken from Richard Nixon under questionable circumstances was a corruption of the system that could not be tolerated. With a Democratic ally in the House, Rep. James O’Hara of Michigan, Muskie mounted a full-scale legal challenge to Dr. Bailey’s betrayal of the Nixon-Agnew ticket.

It was argued that the founders made allowances for “faithless” electors. Indeed, there had been a handful in the past. To the contrary, Muskie asserted, Dr. Bailey’s claim of being free to cast his dissenting vote of conscience was a legal fraud. All through the nomination and election certification process, Muskie pointed out, Bailey represented himself as a person committed to voting for the Nixon-Agnew ticket.

“I say that under the Constitution he had a right of free choice, but that he began to limit his own free choice when he accepted the nomination of his party, when he consented to run on the same ticket with Nixon and Agnew, when he consented to run under a ballot from which his name was absent, and which would generate votes for him only to the extent that the people of North Carolina choose to vote for Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew,” thundered Muskie during a Jan. 6, 1969 Senate speech.

In the end, Congress decided that the motion to repudiate Dr. Bailey’s electoral vote was too much like killing a fly with an elephant gun. Nixon’s electoral college lead was not in doubt.

It was, however, a principled stand by a Democrat who put country over stealing one electoral vote from Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. That this position was taken by the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party that had just lost a close election to Nixon and Agnew says a lot about Sen. Muskie, and the old Democrats of his generation.

Cast your eyes over the political landscape and find me a new Democrat who says it’s wrong to disenfranchise 1,400 military voters, who says it’s bad for the country to steal a presidential election with lawyers and questionable recounting procedures.

Find me a new Democrat who’s putting the country ahead of Al Gore.

If there are any, they’ve been pretty quiet.

John S. Day is a columnist for the Bangor Daily News who is based in Washington, D.C. Readers may send e-mail messages to zanadume@aol.com.