Graham Platner interview

Here’s a long interview with Graham Platner in the NYT (gift link).

Something that should be considered a complete waste of time by everybody on this blog is the question of whether Platner’s candidacy against Susan Collins ought to be supported as vigorously as possible. That’s not a real question, for reasons that should require no elaboration.

Platner, who I’ve just begun to pay any real attention to, is a pretty fascinating character, who embodies a lot of complicated features of life among the millennial generation. He strikes me as somebody who was a very confused and angsty kid, who spent many years fighting in horrific Bush-era wars, despite being on some level an anti-war leftist from a young age (see the confused and angsty thing). He also strikes me as somebody who is somewhat desperate to escape/deny his class background, and there are parts of the interview which capture this in a way that set off my Universal Alice Goffman Early Warning System in a pronounced way. Such as:

You grew up in a small town, didn’t graduate college, became a bartender. But also your father was an attorney, your grandfather was a Cornell-educated architect, quite well known. How do you think about class? Is working-class how you grew up or how you live now?

I work with my hands. I don’t make a lot of money. My wife and I work incredibly hard and we probably make, like, $60,000 a year combined. We don’t have money left over. We’re not saving for retirement. I was lucky. I got to buy my house in 2017, and I could not afford my house today. My house has gone up almost three times in value.

Do you have family money?

My father gave me the mortgage, except, of course, because he’s my dad and he’s an attorney, he gave me a significantly higher interest rate than the bank would have. I could have used a V.A. home loan if I had wanted to, but at that point it was just easier to do it that way. But I could never get that today because I couldn’t afford the monthly mortgage if it was three times what it is. My income hasn’t gone up three times.

My father gave me the mortgage [???] although I could have gotten a VA loan at a lower interest rate?

“I come from privilege and I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to escape that privilege” is a really interesting story, especially when the attempt has been as extreme as Platner’s has been, but it would be nice if he were more straightforward about it, especially with himself. (Note: Platner is three and a half years younger than Jared Kushner and looks twenty years older. This is partly simply a product of the life choices they’ve made, but there’s an element of at least unconscious self-presentation as well).

But again all this is interesting in terms of trying to suss out who this guy might become if he gets elected to the Senate, but is totally irrelevant to the importance of getting him elected first, which is overwhelming.

The whole interview is quite interesting and you should read it before you start yelling at each other.