Missing the point on Platner

The question is whether he's a good nominee, not a good person -- and a nominee you have to constantly defend and explain is not a good one

Graham Platner’s nomination by the Maine Democratic Party to be its standard bearer for the U.S. Senate contest this year seems all but assured at this point. At the same time, a number of negative personal stories have recently emerged about him, including what the New York Times calls “unsettling” behavior towards women in his life. These could be taking a electoral toll on him in a way that the Nazi-themed chest tattoo never did, although the polling is far from definitive.

Yet a lot of this conversation seems to be focused on whether Platner is, at heart, a good person. As the Times notes, some people in his life have volunteered that “while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.” Platner himself has emphasized that who he is today is not the person he was years ago when he got the totenkopf tattoo on his chest and posted sexist comments on the internet. He’s asking people to judge him on who he is now. “I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since,” he says.

If I may say so, this is all a) besides the point, and b) why you don’t nominate someone with a Nazi tattoo in the first place. Allow me to explain.

One thing politicians tend to do when criticized for a string of questionable behaviors is reduce it to a binary question about their character. They’re either a sex pest or not. Either an antisemite or not. Either a racist or not. And in fairness, that’s often what the media coverage about them is like, just adding evidence to one side of the scale or another. (It’s why you’ll often hear a politician accused of a racist act or statement defended by people saying the politician “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.” It’s a deflection, turning questions about an action into an unprovable evaluation of one’s skeletal health.)

But of course, these are not binary categories, and there’s no simple antibody test you can give someone that confirms whether they are or are not a bigot. And even if there were, it wouldn’t necessarily tell you that much about how a person is going to behave in office. Lyndon Johnson accomplished more for civil rights than almost any other president in American history, but you wouldn’t have been able to predict that based on his personal comments from years earlier.

Some, meanwhile, are pushing back on the political coverage. It’s possible this coverage is mean-spirited, poorly-sourced, and designed to tear a candidate down with innuendo; it’s also possible it’s uncovering serious malfeasance by someone who could soon be in a position of power.

Even this, though, is missing the point, in my opinion. All this is coming down to an assessment of Platner’s character, and whether people want to believe that he has redeemed himself or not. He may well have! But that is a personal matter and not one I particularly care about.

The real question here, in my opinion, is whether the Democratic Party should take on the responsibility of making someone like this their standard-bearer for the sake of a win. I wrote last year about what it meant to nominate someone with a Nazi tattoo:

Signaling that the party is okay with this sort of thing can cause cracks in other parts of its coalition. People of color have been drifting rightward in recent elections while some Jewish voters are struggling with their party loyalties, and Democrats signaling that they don’t mind alienating those voters to win an election in Maine could exacerbate that.

For another thing, keeping Platner in this race means that the party will be defending him and his tattoo for the next year. It’s something a smart Republican opponent would easily capitalize on.

A big problem with people with Nazi tattoos is that they tend to have other issues besides just Nazi tattoos. Democrats are setting themselves up to own all that. Many are calculating that all this is okay because Platner has some kind of populist appeal with voters that makes him somewhat immune from scandal coverage and might finally give Democrats the candidate they need to defeat Susan Collins. But all this creates one of two big problems:

1. They might lose. Democrats actually have a shot at taking control of the US Senate thanks to a favorable political environment, Trump’s tinkering in Texas, and Collins’ vulnerability in Maine. The party having to devote resources to saving Platner’s bacon every few weeks hurts its efforts both within Maine and nationally. And a scandalous prominent nominee damages the party’s brand across the country.

2. They might win. Yes, winning majority control of the Senate is a substantial prize in this era and is worth quite a bit of heartache to achieve. But then your majority includes someone who thinks Nazi tattoos are okay. That sends a signal to others who think Nazi tattoos are okay, and also to those who don’t, about what your party stands for.

There are a lot of possible outcomes from all this. It’s certainly plausible that my concerns are overblown — Platner will win in November, occasionally say something distasteful but otherwise be a good advocate for Democratic economic populism and connect the party with some voters it doesn’t always win over. Another possibility is that Platner ends up being a similar type of senator to John Fetterman — delivering a key win but otherwise disappointing the party and undermining its messaging. It’s also possible Platner simply loses and becomes an obscure piece of pub trivia.

But there are considerably worse possibilities. “The other party is so bad that it’s worth nominating someone who is comfortable with Nazi rhetoric and imagery in order to win” is quite literally how we got Trump.