The most fitting line I’ve heard on the crumbling fiasco that was Graham Platner’s Maine U.S. Senate race is also the most unsettling: “A lot of people are willing to dismiss a lot of things.”
Indeed we are. Supporters of Platner, who was Democrats’ great hope for reclaiming a Senate majority, repeatedly dismissed unfavorable disclosures about him, as podcaster Joe Sudbay put it on “The Signorile Report.” Even before the June primary, deplorable actions and published statements attributed to Platner started spilling out from recovered Reddit files. Yet many of Platner’s biggest backers continued to make excuses.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders explained it this way before the latest bomb was dropped: “We cannot continue to allow the Republican Party to control the Senate and push forward Trump’s oligarchic and authoritarian agenda. And there is only one candidate who will do something about it.”
Sanders has long been a favorite politician of mine for his core values and his willingness to speak the truth. But even he got it wrong this time. That blind faith has come back to haunt many.
Now comes the rape allegation: There’s a name ― Jenny Racicot ― a face and credible evidence to back her story, which Politico broke. It fits with accounts from three other women, reported previously by the New York Times, who also had relationships with Platner they described as volatile and toxic. Though Platner could be charming and charismatic, they told the paper, he could also be demeaning and threatening.
Platner has denied any wrongdoing, but none of what they said is hard to believe in light of some of his own words, which have surfaced in past online posts. In one from 2013, he wrote that those who worry about rape shouldn’t get so drunk because “they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” He also called on women to “act like an adult” in such situations. In other words, the responsibility for being raped is ours. Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who was in the primary race against Platner, featured those remarks of his in her campaign ad before dropping out of the race in March. Apparently his backers were already busy looking the other way.
One of the more disturbing rationalizations came from Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. After saying what other notable Democrats have, that it was up to Maine’s voters to decide about Platner, he blamed Trump for having lowered the standard of conduct toward women. Decades ago, he said on ABC’s “This Week,” Platner’s actions could have forced him out of the race. But now, “Whether that low standard is what we ought to proceed with is going to be, again, in the hands of the voters.”
The was in reference to Trump’s boasts, which surfaced in his first campaign, of being able to grab women’s private parts “because when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Since then, Trump has been accused of abuse by dozens of women.
But it sounded as if Warner were suggesting such boasts are now acceptable to use.
And that’s not all Platner did. His campaign’s political director, Genevieve McDonald, a former Maine state representative, resigned even before the primary after Platner was called out for his chest tattoo of a skull and crossbones resembling a Nazi SS unit symbol. That paramilitary force of Hitler’s murdered Jews and others during World War II. Platner has since covered up the tattoo and claims he didn’t know its meaning when he got it in 2007. He said he was in the Marines on leave during a night of big drinking (something he chastizes women for) with others. But an anonymous source who spoke to Jewish Insider last October said Platner knew that a Totenkopf “death’s head” was a symbol for the Nazi unit, and had even joked of it over a decade ago.
In other Platner Reddit posts under the handle “P-Hustle,” he mocked a U.S. soldier who was awarded a Purple Heart after being fired on by the Taliban to protect others. Platner wrote that he “didn’t deserve to live.” He dismissed military sexual assaults, claimed Black people didn’t tip and that he’d have volunteered in a war against Native Americans. He used anti-gay slurs and made derogatory remarks about being gay. He has apologized for some of his statements, attributing them to post-traumatic stress disorder after he left the Army in 2012. As for the gay slurs, he said he had long used them but didn’t take them seriously.
Some opinion writers have been issuing mea culpas for not speaking out against him sooner. In The Nation, writer Steve Phillips called on Platner to step back immediately and for everyone who endorsed him to demand the same.
“When the first credible reports surfaced that Graham Platner … may have sexually assaulted women, my first instinct was one I am not proud of,” Phillips wrote. “I did not want to believe it.”
He noted how high the stakes are this year, which is certainly true and speaks to the abject need to put some guardrails around this autocratic president with a more balanced Congress in power.
But this needs to be a wake-up call for all sides, inside and outside of politics. If we believe rape is never justified, we call it out no matter who is accused, or risk losing our credibility when we denounce the handling of the Epstein files. And if we see evidence that someone we put our trust in can’t be trusted, we need to pull our support before others get hurt.
The oysterman may have seemed like just the right kind of populist, with his everyman credentials and challenges to the status quo. manner. But he also showed evidence of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny ― qualities Democrats have long stood up against.
Sometimes the ends just can’t justify the means. Thankfully we may all have dodged a bullet with Platner out of the race.
This column appeared first in The Des Moines Register online
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