Staggering hypocrisy and pretense pervade Democrat arguments for and against Graham Platner. The lowlife candidate from Maine finally quit the Senate race on July 8.
State and national Democratic parties turned against their man when a former girlfriend accused him of sexual assault. There is some countervailing evidence to support his denials, but the hideous behavior alleged would be on brand for him.
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Either way, the idea that the latest scandal suddenly made an otherwise strong candidate unacceptable would be laughable if it were not such a contemptible fraud. The party had, with only formulaic expressions of concern, previously embraced Platner despite knowing of his thrill-seeking communism and Nazism, his sexting with women not his wife, his aggressive vulgarity in social media posts, and other behavior barely mentionable.
Platner was obviously “unfit for duty” a month ago, but it didn’t matter to Democrats when he looked like beating incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). What turned them against him, exactly as it turned them against President Joe Biden in 2024, was simply that new polls showed he’d lose in the general election. Like me, party chiefs had watched as Maine residents were quietly removing Platner signs from their front yards in recent weeks, and they knew it spelled doom.
Democrats pushed the ejector button under a candidate who’d been chosen with 72% in June’s primary, not out of high principle but out of low expediency; he’d become useless as a tool to wrest a seat from the GOP and retake the Senate. Democrat moral horror was circumstantial — pure power politics, as always.
What of the pretense on Platner’s side? In a bitter and self-absorbed capitulation video, the candidate claimed he’d broken the mold and had brought a hitherto-unknown measure of genuine democracy to America’s electoral politics.
“We did it the right way,” he said, “We engaged in electoral politics, we motivated people, we banded together, we did it the way we were told we are supposed to make change. And we won.”
This is self-aggrandizing nonsense. Engaging in electoral politics is, er, exactly what every candidate does in an election campaign. So is motivating people and banding people together. Remember the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, and Beto O’Rourke? They all claimed to bring something fresh and to be challenging undemocratic panjandrums of sclerotic Washington. But they all failed because none was the complete package they needed to be.
Nor is Platner. He may have captured lightning in a bottle with his rhetoric and may have been a wow on the stump. He was certainly, if ironically, a hit with left-wing women of a certain age. But he didn’t have what it takes to avoid repelling the average voter. Good character is not an unimportant, ancillary, or marginal quality in a leader. He was losing.
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You can’t plausibly claim to be the leader of an overwhelming mass movement, as Platner did, when you’re slipping behind and you’re an embarrassment to your donors and an increasing number of your former supporters.
Platner was plucked from obscurity by Machiavellian practitioners who whispered greatness in his ear. He fell for it completely. Maine Democrats fell for it for a while, too. But, to adapt a phrase, while you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can’t fool enough of them forever.
