Often, when Graham Platner comes up (which is too often), my mind drifts to Claire McCaskill. The current MS NOW analyst was the last Democrat to represent Missouri in the Senate. Notably, she lost in 2018 to Josh Hawley, the guy who’d be playing the Geico Gecko in German ads if the Third Reich never fell. Worse, she lost via the same ballots where Missouri voters approved a minimum wage increase and medical marijuana legalization. The lesson: People like democratic ideas; they just don’t like Democrats.
While that dynamic lurks under all the discussion of the Platner campaign, she was understandably not the first woman to come to mind on Thursday, when The New York Times reported on Platner’s history of “unsettling” behavior toward women, describing his abusive treatment of an ex, Lyndsey Fifield, and his frankly gross ideation about sexual and physical dominance and punishment of others. Friday morning, Fifield took to the former Twitter to accuse the Times of lowballing the severity and number of victims of Platner’s abuse. For many voters, and for many arguments about Platner, her disclosure will be more than sufficient to end the discussion here.
It is difficult to predict what impact this reporting will have on Platner’s chances at the ballot box, nor how he’ll respond to it. Most of that difficulty stems from nobody really being able to agree on what his actual appeal is in the first place, outside of commentators who consider sorting new data into confirmation of their priors to be their primary job. And the appeal of updating one’s priors is pretty immediate, depending on the person commenting. Pundits have their own political brands to manage, and that skews engagement with the candidate and how one depicts him. But this reading sidesteps the more embarrassing mystery of why a mercenary who came from privilege and had a Nazi tattoo seemed to connect with the online left, everyday Democrats and independent Mainers. People like democratic ideas; they just don’t like Democrats. The most embarrassing explanation is that Maine is weird and Mainers are weird. Its politics are weird, its legacies are weird and how its people self-identify is weirdly divorced from the meaning of political terms in a way that is uniquely potent and bewildering even in a country where most everyone’s a bit like that. It is breathtakingly easy to interview a Maine voter and get a reply that begins, “Well, I’m a Republican,” followed by a set of assertions, beliefs and policy preferences that map most closely onto the Vancouver BC Anglo-Separatist Party. At a distance, Maine seems determined to keep electing people with a progressively more unsettling facial resemblance to Michael Myers, whom they don’t actually like; at a distance, it would seem like many voters elected and reelected Paul LePage for the instant visceral spike of doing so and also the long satisfactory slow-release of years of disapproving of him. Which is to say, it’s a place with a higher predisposition for letting anyone hang any political hat on it and get it a little bit right without ever going all the way.
There are other, simpler stories we could tell here. Just a few months can be an eternity in the political zeitgeist, and what was fine about Janet Mills as a Maine gubernatorial candidate in 2022 can be insufficient to voters who’ve watched the last threads of political normalcy unspool and want someone to be angry on their behalf. (Mills also seemed determined to prove this case .) Other uncharitably simple explanations are that Mills was the chosen candidate of an increasingly feckless and contemptible Senate majority leader, and she was a 78-year-old seeking a six-year term for a party that already has a visible problem with elected officials who are sundowning when they’re not dropping dead in office.
The laziest explanation is that we are a nation that loves galoots and the various species of well-meaning, locally grown oaves. Platner overlays a fitter figure onto the Homer Simpson physiognomy of blunderingly caring lummox, who is doing his best and whom we are pop-culturally predisposed to hug and forgive while he figures it out. The purposeless wandering of a child of comfort, veering between what appear to be wild political extremes, is legible as a journey of discovery, albeit a more distressingly stupid and harmful one than the average. It is not hard to believe that a person like Platner has arrived at a settled vision of himself and that, after lots of mistakes, this is who he is from here on out, but it isn’t any harder to believe that he’s also one persuasive conversation away from a horrible paradigm shift.
It may then be that the masculinists, the class warriors and the inherited intraparty fights from the 2016 Democratic primary that all seek to take credit or assign blame for whatever Platner is, meet in Missouri where Claire McCaskill last trod. The years following haven’t been great for McCaskill. She appears to have an MS NOW job for as long as she wants one, but even for a network amenable to this discourse, she still stands out as a reliable source of DNC /Beltway thinkspeak. Most of her observations can be met with the question “Who is this for?” equally on the basis of entertainment, analysis and political problem-solving. Some people are just the sort who could run on a free cocaine platform and still lose an election in a state called “Bachelor Party.” Freed from the constraints of ever having to run again, McCaskill still sounds like someone who message-tested whether to tell Jen Psaki that “it’s great to be here.” It is not hard to believe that a person like Platner has arrived at a settled vision of himself. Misogyny plays a role in the process of seeing the candidate as legitimate just for showing up and being themselves, and it would take a heart of stone not to acknowledge that surely a part of McCaskill’s tendency to talk like a cat walking across a wet floor is owed to being punished again and again for talking “the wrong way,” which is too frequently “at all.” And, if there is one through line in the various pieces seeking to find the mysterious source of Platner’s appeal, it is that Mainers keep saying that they liked that he showed up places candidates usually don’t, and looked like he was from there, which candidates usually don’t either. Campaigns spend a lot of money generating the illusion of authenticity, but there is always an undercurrent of misogyny attending the thought that the candidate looks like a candidate and inspires a sense of self-recognition in half the audience. McCaskill faced no small amount of accusations of shrillness, smugness and invasive nannying, as well as a failure to be a decisive male-coded leader like military veteran Josh Hawley, and some leftists and podcasters seem perversely determined to adopt misogynist framing in celebrating Platner . It continues to play a role in the way Platner’s mistakes are seen only as totems of his own enlightenment and mile markers on his growth. It will play an enormous role if his candidacy emerges effectively unchanged, and it’s a shame we lack a political environment that would provide more candidates against which to test the dimensions of it.
That is a problem bigger than Platner and his confusion about the order in which one should work on fixing the country and fixing one’s self. Finding an affable dunce with his heart in the right place isn’t hard in America, nor is finding people who like them enough to give them money. Whatever Platner’s genius is, it calls to mind Stephen Jay Gould’s line about being less interested in the “convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” There are 50 Graham Platners in every state — native sons and daughters from the ground up and as “from there” as anyone with generations of kin already buried in it — and they’re just waiting for someone to find them and fund them. The problem is that no one found the other 49, and Platner provides excuse enough to never go looking for them.
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