In the Washington Post yesterday, Platner’s former political director issued an op-ed headlined, “I know firsthand why Graham Platner shouldn’t be a U.S. Senator.” An excerpt:
If America wants a stronger democracy, elevating leaders with integrity is essential. Leaders with sound judgment and ethics. …Platner has shown us that he is not such a leader. He exhibits a pattern of dishonest behavior that is impossible to ignore. Despite being exposed by a series of scandals beginning last October, he kept assuring voters and the Democratic Party that there were no more skeletons in his closet. Then more emerged — the latest, in recent days, have involved former girlfriends’ serious accusations of physical mistreatment…Troubling posts kept surfacing. Politico ran a story with his online posts about political violence that were new to me. I started making calls, and someone sent me the full archive of his Reddit account. ….I submitted my resignation and made it public….after my departure, the campaign offered me $15,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I refused…I went on record with the New York Times. Platner and his campaign admitted the sexting occurred, but then he also denounced the reports as “journalistic malpractice” and “gossip from a former staffer” — me. He was upset, apparently, that I said he had sexted with as many as a dozen women when, his campaign clarified, it was only about half that many….
In the recent past, a piece like that would kill any candidacy dead. But it won’t, because Democrats supporting Platner are irredeemable. This, my friends, is today’s Democratic Party. When Akin made his head-exploding statement about rape, every Republican repudiated him. But here is what James Carville, the ruthless Machiavellian behind Bill Clinton’s rise, says about Platner:
“And you know if Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could work with Joseph Stalin — who, by the way, well, I’ll tell you this, he was a bad guy, a really bad guy, alright — then I can overlook a tattoo…We got a fucked up guy, who, he could be a hundred times more fucked up than he is. He’d never be as fucked up as what we got in Washington now anyway…Abraham Lincoln had to suspend habeas corpus. Why? Because he had to win a Goddamned war, OK? We got to win this.”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is your Democratic Party. Carville compares Platner to Stalin, who murdered more people than Hitler, and equates taking over the Senate to winning the Civil War. Endorsing Graham Platner, defending him, voting for him, leave no room for ambiguity. These are all proof positive of the sick and dangerous mindset represented by Rationalization 31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now,” the motto of assassins, demagogues, revolutionaries and despots.
Graham Platner is a human smoking gun.
Ethics Alarms 
I wonder if we were too hard on Akin. I mean, we have a LOT of physicians who have been saying that men can get pregnant. Medical schools are now teaching that it isn’t only women who can get pregnant. Akin’s statement isn’t any more ignorant than that and he didn’t go to or run a medical school.
He’s just more proof that a lot of people would vote for a ham sandwich if it had the right letter next to it.
A ham sandwich is better qualified to be a US Senator than Platner.
ET weighs in again:
James Carville: Maybe We Need A “F–ked Up Veteran” Like Graham Platner In The Senate To Remind Them What War Does To People | Video | RealClearPolitics
You have to admit; Carville has a very active mind.
I don’t even understand why this is a war democrats are willing to burn the house down on. It seems like Collins votes for them half the time anyway. There certainly going for a lot of trouble to overturn a nevertrumper.
This is essentially outing Breyer for Jackson, but at least Jackson had the DEI qualifications and lacked the problematic past.
That’s an excellent point. The only thing I can think of offhand is that the Democratic Party can’t admit that any Republicans could be good. By supporting Platner they’re asserting that literally all that matters for a candidate is party control, rather than character, competence, or even platform. If any of those mattered, then it would open the door for a Republican to sometimes be the better candidate.
This is a great opportunity to prompt Democrats to say, “I would unite with a Republican to do right, and no Democrat to do wrong.”
The reason the Democrats are willing to die on this hill is not because they think Collins wouldn’t vote with them half the time. The question is attaining the majority in the Senate, and they think Collins is vulnerable. The majority leader sets the agenda, is highly influential in committee assignments, and can refuse to consider bills he doesn’t like. There is a great deal of power in the majority leader. This becomes increasingly important if the Democrats want to impeach Trump, because if the Senate remains in Republican hands, the majority leader can simply ignore any articles of impeachment from the House.
I know Jack has long promoted the idea that all politics are local, but increasingly these battles are being fought with a national view in mind, not what the local politics are about. All the redistricting happening is about trying to get and retain a majority in the House. Unbelievable amounts of money are going to into local campaigns not because of local interests, but because of how people see this race or that race impacting the national stage.
The Democrats are pushing Platner so that there’s one more D and one less R in the Senate, getting them closer to a majority. The only angst over Platner is whether the scandals make him less likely to defeat Collins.
Yikes. That makes sense, but it also means that they’re thinking way too small, inside the box. The Constitution does not define political parties, which means that “Senate majority leader” can’t be an official position. I followed that train of logic to Wikipedia, which attributes the authority you describe to “long-standing Senate precedent” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_leaders_of_the_United_States_Senate#Powers_of_the_majority_leader). If the Democrats really wanted to introduce a motion to proceed on a bill or impeachment, they could do that.
The question is, do they want to leave that precedent intact because they’re afraid of the Republicans using it against them (which doesn’t seem to be stopping them on other fronts)? Or are they just too ignorant to realize that just because the Republicans have a majority in the Senate, it doesn’t give them any legal authority to suppress bills if the Democrats can sway enough Republicans and/or independents to get a majority?
Maybe it’s not as sophisticated as I’m making it out to be. Maybe they just want a few mercenary candidates who will vote on impeachment and some symbolic but badly-designed bills without question, in return for a cushy position of power they can abuse.
The Founders were opposed to political parties, which is why they aren’t mentioned or alluded to in our founding documents. They believed they were inherently corrupting. They were right about that, but not human nature. People take sides, then tend to hang out with people they agree with.
Wouldn’t “parties” ultimately be addressed in the founding documents by the 1st Amendment…? Whereas the Founders didn’t openly discuss them because they recognized the danger, there’s zero chance they didn’t know parties wouldn’t occur.
“The Founders were opposed to political parties, which is why they aren’t mentioned or alluded to in our founding documents.”
One (1) of the reasons I’m an Independent.
Heck, if it was good enough for them (an effort to avoid their overriding, yet legitimate, concern with FACTION) it’s good enough for me.
PWS
EC,
The thing to keep in mind is that the progressive wing of the Democratic party has long desired to transform the United States into a socialist “paradise” where the party leaders get to reign supreme for time unending. If you’ve heard the desires of many Democratic talking heads, like James Carville, you’ll see that they are increasingly in favor of taking whatever measure is necessary to establish a permanent majority. Make Puerto Rico and Washington DC states (which will, supposedly, at 4 Democratic seats to the Senate, and reliably boost a Democratic majority in the House). Stack the Supreme Court with additional liberal justices so that it consistently rules in line with Democratic desires. Grant amnesty to all the illegals so they can legally vote (and presumably vote Democratic).
One of the great issues I have with our current political landscape is that any compromise with Democrats at this juncture is tantamount to surrender to whatever they plan. They aren’t interested in working together: they want power. That is one of the four basic human temptations (the others being wealth, pleasure, and respect), and they are driving for it relentlessly. That is why they have thrown all principles out the window. Their only guiding principle is what gains them power and allows them to hold onto it.
What is extremely dangerous is that the Democratic slide into this Marxist, “Rules for Radicals” behavior is that it is increasingly enticing Republicans to follow suit. We’re dangerously close to have our two governing parties working at nothing except trying to seize the tiller from the other party.
I… Don’t understand this one. There has to be a better candidate, right? There isn’t a Democrat in the entire state of Maine that they think couldn’t do a better job than him? I think I have to assume corruption here… Maybe Platner has nudes on every Democrat with even a whiff of power in the state?
The comparison is being made to Trump. He’s plain spoken, “authentic”, speaks his mind, he fights, he doesn’t back down…I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the theory: a Democrat who appeals to the worst Trump voters.
HT, I’m in the same camp. Surely they could have found a better candidate? There are three other Democrats that voters can choose today: Janet Mills, David Costello, and write-in candidate Andrea LaFlamme. But I guess the problem is that Platner came out talking tough, which convinced a lot of donors that he might be the one to oust Collins, and only after all the money poured into his campaign, and made it a lock for the primary, did all the scandals start to emerge. Platner’s supporters are alleging that all the scandals are manufactured by outside agents (I guess CVB below has information that it is Democratic agents fanning the flames for scandals), and they’ll stick with him through thick or thin. So I think the Democrats painted themselves into a corner. They can’t redirect the funds at this point, so all they can do is either keep trying to push him across the finish line, or do some kind of backdoor dealing that convinces him to step aside so the establishment can select a new candidate. The problem with the latter is creating a backfire so intense that Democratic voters don’t show up at the general election. But seriously, is no one out there trying to find quality candidates and vetting them before they get gobs of money?
More dangerous than incompetence is people who double down on incompetence. If the Democratic leaders aren’t willing to admit they made a mistake and concede gracefully, or start endorsing those other candidates you mentioned, people need to abandon them.
The trick is that it would require people to do the work of finding competent candidates themselves. That’s something they should know how to do anyway. It starts with people defining what problems they want solved.
I don’t even know how we get here though…. We’re talking about running for Senate with the backing of a major party… Do they not have a vertting system? One that might ask questions like “Do you have a Nazi tattoo almost as big as the one from American History X on your chest?”
Platner’s candidacy calls into question whatever process produced it.
As for now the Democrats are closing ranks behind Platner using rationalizations. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) uses past behavior of Donald Trump as rationalization.
I wonder what the Democrat’s game plan is, and what is going on behind the scenes. The timing of the revelations in May indicates that the source of the revelations are the Democrats, who hope to push him out the race before the finalization of the nomination early July; Republicans would have waited with these revelations until October as they did with AG Jay Jones horrible tweets (National Review new about those tweets for years and sat on it to be revealed at a politically opportune moment). Janet Mills might have suspended campaigning but she is still on the primary ballot, and even after the primary there is still room for the Democrats to do a Torricelli-Lautenberg style bait-and-switch.
If we keep playing this game of “your politician is worse than mine”, we will all lose. You know who wins? That’s right, the politicians. Because they can do anything they want, and we will let them get away with it, because they’re protecting us against someone worse. This is Douglas Adams’s lizard metaphor: Everyone votes for lizards they hate because it’s the only way they know how to make sure “the wrong lizard” doesn’t get elected.
We need to change the game. We need to look at what we really want, and get creative about designing policies we can unite behind. The politicians won’t do it for us. The experts won’t do it for us. We can do it ourselves.
In the immortal words of Diane Chambers, “pond scum.”
What I don’t understand is that, with all the media coverage I’ve heard about Platner, only in THIS blog have I heard a single word about his basic lack of relevant experience. Congratulations, Jack.
Lathechuck