I have no idea what life would be like with Independent Eliot Cutler as Maine’s next governor, but it sure would be refreshing to find out.

Ten days ago, Cutler took the first step towards running for the Blaine House, when he filed papers with the Maine Ethics Commission to form a campaign committee. He’s still not an official candidate, but the step allows him to raise campaign funds.

An unsuccessful, though unexpectedly strong, contender in the three-way 2010 gubernatorial race (garnering over 36 percent of the vote, about 9,000 votes less than GOP front runner Paul LePage), Cutler, has an impressive resume. A graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, he has extensive experience in government, law and business.

He was legislative assistant to Sen. Edmund Muskie, served as associate director for natural resources, energy and science in the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Carter, helped found one of the country’s most prominent environmental law firms, and has sat on the boards of several large companies. In addition, he lived and worked in China for several years.

Most importantly, he’s as independent in thought as in name, shunning partisan slogans and entrenched policies.

In an interview with Maine Magazine in July 2011, Cutler touted Maine’s natural resources – its forests, land, river and sea – as providing the state’s competitive advantage and advocated leveraging them for economic growth rather than trying to attract the kind of businesses, like major drug companies, every other state is bidding for.

In the same article, he promoted expanding trade with the China, describing the Chinese as “more like us than most people in the world” in entrepreneurial spirit, and suggested that Maine’s educational system could be improved by creating more magnet schools because they generate “palpable excitement.”

A strong environmentalist with a business orientation who wants to increase trade with China and open more nontraditional schools? Does that fit neatly into the paradigm of either major party? Not hardly!

For decades the Republican and Democrat parties have been clubbing one another and the public senseless with sound-byte platitudes that vastly oversimplify and distort reality.

It’s called “reframing” in politics. If you label income tax a “job killer,” you make toxic waste out of a revenue stream that supports essential public services. If you call extravagant public spending an “investment,” you make pork look like a prudent expenditure that will pay for itself and insure future prosperity. What issues you reframe and how you reframe them usually depend upon which party you belong to.

This dumbed-down, deceptive form of expression is to be expected in the theatrical atmosphere of a political campaign. The problem is that it has carried over into governance and become a substitute for critical thinking and thoughtful compromise. Either elected officials have come to believe in their own exaggerated campaign rhetoric, or they’re afraid that voters won’t re-elect them if they admit it was only rhetoric.

Hence, Democrats refuse to let go of their “frame” or Republicans of theirs in order to solve complex public problems. They won’t phrase it that way, of course. If you ask them, they’ll simply tell you they’re fighting for their core values (which just happen to be the same as America’s and Maine’s).

The net result, of course, is the now infamous phenomenon of political “gridlock,” which prevents prompt, original or effective solutions to public challenges. A secondary result is “demonization,” a stratagem by which incumbents assign blame for their own inability to break gridlock or solve problems to certain “undesirables.” It’s just a matter of picking a favorite scapegoat: the “1 percent” that monopolizes wealth and exploits the middle class, the “47 percent” who want something for nothing, immigrants who crowd welfare rolls, environmentalists who stifle business growth, gays who destroy society’s moral fiber, and so on.

Cutler has characterized the major political parties as increasingly irrelevant — too doctrinally narrow and pure to accommodate those who have diverse viewpoints on different issues, too strident to engage in civil dialogue. As an alternative, he started OneMaine, an organization where centrists can “take refuge from political parties.”

I get Cutler’s point on the future of the major political parties, though I think he may be overstating the case. Despite the ever-increasing number of voters who describe themselves as independents, it’s premature to write the parties’ obituaries.

They have shown themselves surprising adaptable and resilient when confronted with new electoral realities (as illustrated most recently by the GOP’s abrupt turnaround on immigration reform in response to the increasing strength of the Hispanic vote).

Indeed, Republicans and Democrats have been able to preserve their names and identities since before the Civil War precisely because they have periodically trimmed their sails to changing political winds. The free-trade Republican Party of today, for instance, would hardly recognize the protectionist-tariff Republican Party of late 19th and early 20th centuries. The pro-civil-rights Democratic Party of today has little in common with the Jim Crow segregationist Democratic Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Still, to the extent that the major political parties react too slowly to the accelerating pace of societal change and increasing speed of communications, they may eventually wither, deserted by growing numbers of independent voters weary of being offered yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems. They may be replaced by ad-hoc campaign and fundraising organizations, centered on individual candidates or transient voter blocs.

Maine’s new Independent senator (and former governor) Angus King will serve as a test for the effectiveness of nonaffiliated politicians in Congress.

After a term of bitter partisan politics and name-calling under Gov.LePage, it certainly would be tempting to invite Eliot Cutler to perform the same test in the Blaine House.