More Platner stuff

Good column (gift link) from Michelle Goldberg:

The Platner campaign represented an electoral insurgency against the Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations against those who launched it. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Most at fault, of course, is Platner himself. He allegedly victimized Racicot, and then his campaign victimized her again, putting her into a situation where she felt she had to go public. He betrayed his supporters by plunging into a campaign while knowing he had a closet full of skeletons and drawing people who believed in him into a doomed enterprise.

Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.

Also liable for this disaster are the progressive operatives who recruited Platner and were so infatuated with his identity — a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics — that they failed to do their due diligence. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff, didn’t want to spring for a thorough background check, which can take weeks and cost around $20,000. “Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days,” The Journal said.

Moraff, who travels the country trying to recruit left-wing, working-class candidates, reportedly learned about some of Platner’s troubling Reddit posts but decided to charge forward anyway. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” he told The Journal.

He’s correct about the appetite for unconventional candidates, but that is no excuse for such willful sloppiness. Before blithely assuming that voters would forgive a candidate’s flaws, he had a responsibility to try to find out what those flaws were.

This fiasco might seem to vindicate the establishment that Platner railed against, but Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who wanted to stop Platner, is also partly culpable here. Schumer badly misread the Democratic electorate and tried to clear the field for his preferred candidate, Maine’s 78-year-old governor, Janet Mills, leaving a vacuum that Platner filled.

As NOTUS reported last week, Dan Kleban, a co-founder of Maine Beer Company, had been preparing to launch a populist, anti-Wall Street Senate bid last summer, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tried to dissuade him. “He and his campaign were left with the impression that if he ran, Democrats in Washington would make it difficult because they were holding their support for Maine Gov. Janet Mills,” NOTUS wrote. Kleban ended up delaying the start of his campaign, not getting in until Platner had already caught fire.

While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.

One person who tried to alert Democrats was Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald. She quit when the first Platner scandals emerged and has been increasingly outspoken against him. Progressive operatives made her seem like a vindictive person eager to curry favor with Maine’s political establishment. In retrospect, she looks much more like someone who took a profound professional risk to do the right thing. I can’t be the only one who regrets not taking her more seriously.

If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens space up for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape proper vetting.

Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics. Many progressives want to believe that with a sufficiently populist message and style, they can win over voters alienated from the Democratic Party, obviating the need for ideological concessions. Platner seemed to embody this possibility, and that made a lot of people look past a lot of red flags until it was almost too late.

A relevant side note is that younger LGM posters, to the extent such entities exist, might not realize the extent to which until fairly recently the general category “womanizing” for public figures somehow contained everything from serial adultery to sexual harassment to straight up sexual assault, as if these things were all just instantiations of naughty sexy time.

For example, my personal belief, based on having spent some time looking at the evidence, is that the accusation that Bill Clinton is some sort of “sex creep” is pretty much a successful right wing hit job, conflating Clinton’s long history of serial adultery, which he was very much struggling to escape when he allowed himself to become entangled with Monica Lewinsky, with two almost certainly false accusations of sexual assault, and one almost certainly false accusation of sexual harassment. This propagandistic conflation was in large part made possible by the whole traditional “womanizing” frame. Donald Trump’s history as a serial rapist still benefits in an atavistic way from the persistence of this frame in the fundie right wing.