In the process of the everyday execution of my trade and profession, I often have the opportunity to repair and remodel older homes.  One such home was up here in the foothills of the highlands in small town called Brownville Junction.  As the name implies, this little town was once a bustling depot for trains as they ferried the abundant resources of the north woods to areas abroad.  This whole town was built and supported by the rails that ran through them, that is, until the advent of the regulatory tyranny of the Democrat Party in this State.  But that is a story for another time.

As I carefully removed the handcrafted, craftsman style moldings on doorways and baseboards as to preserve them for reattachment, I noticed something very striking and unique about this trim work.  Time to time on the backs of the wood a signature was scrawled in black with the name of the tradesman, his place of residence and date the piece was attached.  I call this unique and striking because in our modernized and mechanized age the time of handmade wood trim is a bygone era and the hands that expertly shaped and signed them have been, in many instances, laid to rest.

Yes, there is a certain sadness to acknowledge the end of an era, but the sentiment is not gone.  As a young boy learning the trades, my mentors would often admonish me by asking if I was willing to sign my name to the work I had completed and they were inspecting.  Now as a father of two rambunctious boys just getting their feet wet in the trades, I often hear myself reminding them that everything they do is a reflection on their name, their reputation.

Can you sign your name to it?  Are you so secure in your abilities and your product that you would scrawl your name, your residence and the time you built it knowing full well that very signature would leave none other to blame for failure but you?  That blackened scrawl that I read in Brownville Junction represented years of learning, hard work, failure, mistakes, experience and finally the graduation to the confidence to write the signature of a craftsman.

Sadly, many leaders of today will not sign their name to their work or, if they do, they won’t stand by it.  It starts with our sitting President, who has blamed everyone but himself for the actions or inactions of his administration.  The fault has consistently been blamed on President Bush, then Congress and his new scapegoat now, shamefully, is his wife and little girls.  When his campaign managers are pressed to answer if the country is better off than four years ago, they dodge repeatedly, then point to the Maine Ron Paul fiasco and say, with all the petulance of a fourteen year old, “at least we’re united”.

Maine’s leader of the Stealth Democrats, former Governor Angus, will not divulge where he stands politically on issues, who his allies are and how he will vote if he is elected.  Thankfully, the people of Maine have his record to look at.  But the Monarch of Mystery still will not even acknowledge the facts that are on the record.  The deficits he burdened this State with he calls theoretical.  He calls the exposition of his corrupt dealings, by pushing through State laws, which would facilitate his wind energy business, a twisting of the truth.  No, the only twisting is a certain King of Lies in the wind.  Can you sign your name to anything…Governor King?  And you want our trust and vote?

Herbert Clark, who is challenging Senator Doug Thomas for his seat, will not stand behind his bill that he co-sponsored in the legislature.  He said he didn’t realize what was in the bill.  How can you call yourself a competent legislator and not know what the bill you sponsored was about?  It was about information, a reminder, Mr. Clark, finding and providing information.  You, sir, and the special interests groups holding your puppet strings are fighting the dispensation of vital information to the people of Maine.  The Honorable Herbert Clark needs to stand by his signature.

Representative Jeff McCabe of Skowhegan has a different approach to the concept of a signature piece.  Mr. McCabe so admired the work of his mentor John Martin that he took Martin’s work and put his own name on it, word for word.  In the real world, it’s called plagiarism.

There seems to be a theme of accountability or the lack thereof, running through the Democrat ranks that are completely divergent from the core of American exceptionalism.  This November the people of Maine and the rest of the Nation must force the Democrat Party to sign their name to their handiwork, make them stand by it and face the repercussions for it.  If we the people do not demand this, they will never do it on their own.