Among its many worthy attributes, the hit Netflix series “Death By Lightning” reminds America of one the political giants in the years after the Civil War: Maine’s James Blaine. We haven’t forgotten Blaine here in his home state, though it’s true that we mention his house a whole lot more than we mention the man himself.

I walked away from the series convinced we ought to remember him as a role model among Maine’s many distinguished leaders.

As a leader of the Republican Party faction that sought to uplift those formerly held in bondage, a spirited and politically savvy Blaine fought Democrats and GOP politicians who saw government mostly as a gravy train.

The post-Reconstruction era was an ugly, corrupt period that we should study more as we try to steer a path through our own iffy era. Blaine, who served as a U.S. senator, a secretary of state and the Republican nominee for president in 1884, had an eloquence that is sorely lacking in U.S. politics these days. He once denounced a crooked New Yorker, Republican Sen. Roscoe Conkling, in terms that make today’s speeches on Capitol Hill seem positively tame.

Weighing Conkling against a respectable politician who had died, Blaine contrasted the two: “Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion.” It’s no wonder Conkling became a lifelong enemy.

In the new television series — and in the excellent 2011 book on which it is based, Candice Millard’s “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President” — Blaine comes across as a wily, insightful politician.

It’s worth noting that only two men have served as secretary of state for three presidents: Blaine and Daniel Webster, each of them giants of their time and both, somehow, little more than vague whispers in the popular memory of Americans. Unfortunately, we care more about presidents than their betters.

In the Netflix show, Blaine is played brilliantly by Bradley Whitford, with a long gray beard and an exuberance that both fits the character and puts him under the spotlight where he belongs.

Blaine came to Maine initially to become the editor and co-owner of the Kennebec Journal. Those were heady times for newspaper editors, whose importance in public life has sharply diminished in the years since.

Journalism propelled Blaine to the heights of power, landing him at the doorstep to the White House and at Garfield’s side when assassin Charles Guiteau opened fire on the president in the summer of 1881.

“The president and I were walking arm in arm towards the train,” Blaine said later that day, when he heard two shots “and saw a man run. I started after him, but seeing he was grabbed just as he got out of the room, I came to the president and found him lying on the floor” beside a pool of blood.

Guiteau, a madman from Illinois who craved a government post, blamed Blaine for the assassination because, he said, the Mainer refused to name him the American consul to Paris.
Later, Guiteau explained that he shot the president after seeing in Garfield and Blaine a fellowship that “confirmed in me the belief that Garfield had sold himself, body and soul, to Blaine, and that Blaine was using him.”

Guiteau’s world was divorced from reality. But if Blaine was using Garfield to get to the presidency as the mentally ill former lawyer claimed, it almost worked.

At the 1884 convention, Blaine won over his party after pushing aside President Chester Arthur’s bid for the nomination, and headed into a general election as the head of a party that hadn’t lost a presidential election since 1860.

It turned out, though, that New Yorkers weren’t ready to forgive Blaine’s assault on Conkling and a crooked political machine that pumped money into the pockets of Empire State politicians.
It didn’t help, either, that many Irish voters at the time were dubious about Blaine thanks to Maine’s temperance laws and the nominee’s own record of pushing for separation of church and state.

In the end, Blaine failed to win a close contest. For all his charm and brilliance, he fell short of his hopes, the only one of nine Republican nominees between 1860 and 1912 who did not become president.

Of course, winning isn’t everything.

For us, what should matter is that Blaine showed that a shrewd politician with wit and principles can successfully pursue policies that change the course of history, from promoting better relations with Latin America to encouraging the nation’s commercial expansion.

If only there were more like him today.