Set aside, for a moment, that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner spent years with a tattoo resembling the Nazi SS Totenkopf; that he blamed sexual assault victims for their predicament; that he called rural white Americans stupid racists; that he advocated political violence; that he mocked a wounded Purple Heart recipient; that he joked about the Virgin Mary being a “skank”; and that he joined a hookup site while married.The more interesting question is why Democrats have shown such loyalty to him. After hearing so much about Platner’s everyman appeal, I went down a rabbit hole, watching his speeches and listening to his interviews. Virtually every one of them is crammed with brain-numbing platitudes and freshman-level socialist sloganeering. His rhetoric makes former Vice President Kamala Harris sound weighty by comparison.
“This is a race about performative politics they’re used to,” Platner told a crowd recently. “What they don’t understand is that this is a race about us.”
This kind of banality, and there is a lot of it, calls to mind Lt. Frank Drebin trying to win over the love of his life in The Naked Gun by telling her that “maybe the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans … but this is our hill, and these are our beans.”
