Splatner

You've gotta expect that every once in a while

[Had a little issue Monday night, so I will be brief.]

I don’t think you should feel bad if you wanted the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Maine to win the 2026 election.

You might feel awkward, as the candidate, Graham Platner, has now been very credibly accused of sexual assault and many of his prominent backers are withdrawing their support. And you may hope that Platner withdraws himself before the deadline for replacing him on the ballot, and that whoever gets that gig can pull it off.

I have poked around social media and seen people declaring that anyone who supported Platner heretofore was OK with Nazis (w/r/t his tattoo) and was OK with misogyny (w/r/t a previous less-than-sexual-assault accusation) and is therefore as bad as he was/is. Presumably this includes the majority of Maine Democrats who nominated him. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to do with that accusation; recuse themselves from voting, maybe, until they’re reformed.

I addressed some of Platner’s issues in a June 3 essay, in which I repeated my support for Janet Mills as the candidate but indicated that if Platner were nominated I’d hope for his victory.

I said that I wasn’t too concerned about his tattoo because I figured it was just the sort of thing a knucklehead who joined the marines might do. Do I feel bad about that? No, I still think he’s a knucklehead. And I don’t think I can be faulted for not intuiting that he would be a rapist on that account, because I’ve known some knuckleheads who weren’t rapists. (If you ask “how can I be sure,” you got me, pal, I can’t. But I understand sex criminals often come in the sleeker Ted Bundy kind of package, too. Not everyone is blessed with second sight.)

I also said Republicans didn’t have room to talk about Platner and they still don’t. The Democrats could flush the last remaining Nazi war criminal out of hiding and run him and that would still be true. Shit, I would probably vote for him. What’s his position on affordable housing?

And that’s my position on this candidate for whom I did not vote but who I would prefer to see win this seat than Susan Collins, who would cheerfully murder every one of us, including those of us who are raging at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren today, for a White House meet-and-greet.

I am sympathetic to the idea that Democratic candidates ought to be morally sound, because in addition to setting policy Democrats also ought to set an example. It’s much easier to sell a vision of a better world if you evince a devotion and fitness to build one on your own time. So there will be an upside if Platner can be run off and replaced by a decent person (fingers crossed!) even if that person loses. And, no mistake, if the seat is lost, it’s nobody’s fault but Platner’s.

The least efficacious result, in my view, would be a continuing interparty brawl over his nomination. But we who have free souls, it touches us not. The argument for post-Platner is pretty much the same as it was for Platner: We have to get the American people to consider the present situation enough of an emergency to break some voting patterns. (And they might. Remember, they were just as fooled by John Fetterman as the rest of us!) Everything else is chickenshit.