Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue
· The Atlantic
The Senate race in Maine looks significantly different than it did 48 hours ago. Yesterday, Politico reported a credible allegation of sexual assault against the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. In a video posted after the story broke, Platner denied the accusation but said that his campaign would explore the best way forward, opening the door to what seems like an inevitable withdrawal from the race.
Now the voices that had most vehemently defended Platner during previous scandals or vouched for the necessity of his folksy progressivism have withdrawn their endorsements, one after another, and called for him to drop out. Among those voices are Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ro Khanna, and Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau. No doubt, none of these Democratic politicians, party power brokers, or podcasters were aware of the alleged rape when they made and maintained their endorsements. Nearly everyone who previously supported Platner seems to have since reversed course. Credible allegations of sexual assault do, indeed, go too far.
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But the question remains: Why was this horrific allegation the threshold when Platner had so obviously transgressed so many times before? Perhaps Platner’s Nazi tattoo should have been a sufficient indicator that he lacked the character to be a senator. Perhaps maintaining that SS logo for two decades, covering it up only when it became politically inconvenient, demonstrated that he lacked the judgment for national office. Perhaps a multiyear history of not just having abhorrent views about women and minorities, but feeling the need to post them for the world to see, could have told us that he is not the person to be Maine’s voice in Washington. Maybe a well-documented history of contemptible behavior in his personal life should have been enough, when taken with everything else, for Democrats to conclude that Platner was exactly the person he appeared to be.
[Jonathan Chait: With Graham Platner, Democrats got drunk on the beer test]
When Platner emerged last year as the Democrats’ shiny new object—DSA sensibilities with a gruff voice and working-class clothes—many who favored his brand of leftist populism rallied to help him defeat Democratic centrism. He managed to do so when his primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign before votes were cast. Platner’s backers hoped that he could do the same against Susan Collins this fall. But when a clear pattern of Platner’s bad behavior and bad judgment emerged, these Democrats held firm, using their positions of prominence to assure voters that what we all could see was somehow not as it seemed. This latest allegation was not a black-swan event—a shocking and unexpected revelation from an otherwise strong candidate. Rather, it was the most recent in a steady drumbeat of disqualifying revelations.
It’s good that those who have changed their mind about Platner are now telling the woman who spoke with Politico, Jenny Racicot, that they will not stand with her alleged victimizer. But why were the Jews who were targeted by the organization whose logo he bore not worthy of the same support? And was Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative woman who alleged that Platner had engaged in emotional and physical abuse (also denied by Platner), less worthy because of her politics? What does it say about Platner’s defenders that his other horrible behavior was within their range of acceptability?
Those who waited until this week to rescind their endorsements had all the indicators they needed to surmise that Platner was a problem. And pretending otherwise required a willful denial of the facts. For instance, they claimed that he hadn’t known the significance of his tattoo until recently, despite the fact that at least three people said they’d had conversations with Platner about the image prior to its public disclosure.
We have spent months listening to spin from Democrats arguing that what was clear about Platner’s character was somehow more nuanced and explainable, all because progressives had found a candidate in Carhartt. The idea that a candidate could have a Nazi tattoo and stay in the race sounds more like a subplot from Veep than the reality upon which several prominent Democrats staked their reputations.
[Elizabeth Bruenig: Yet more damning revelations about Graham Platner]
When the Platner campaign comes to its ignominious end, as it almost certainly will whether he withdraws or not, the value of conducting a postmortem will not be about Platner himself, a deeply flawed person worthy of neither the office he sought nor the support he received. It will be about those who gave him that support. Not only did they stand by Platner; they expressed outrage toward those of us who said he was unfit. And contemptibly, they attacked one of Platner’s accusers, Fifield. “Believe women,” it seems, does not extend to victims who commit the unforgivable sin of having voted for Republicans.
Perhaps next time these officeholders, influencers, advocates, and organizations will think twice before throwing their full-throated support behind someone they do not actually know or, at a minimum, withhold support from those who are clearly unacceptable. They lied to voters, either by vouching for the virtue of a candidate about whom they did not have specific knowledge, or by claiming that someone they knew to be detestable was not. Perhaps now voters will think twice before heeding the advice of Sanders, Warren, Khanna, Favreau, and others, or of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, the advocacy organization that had endorsed Platner, who served in the Marines, and reiterated its support through the previous scandals.
The voters themselves should not be let off the hook; a republic’s survival requires the engagement of an educated electorate. Even though most of Platner’s behavior had been widely reported prior to the June 9 primary, an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters in Maine selected Platner. They either made no effort to inform themselves about the man for whom they cast their vote, did not believe the well-corroborated claims against him, or felt that Nazi iconography, alleged partner abuse, admitted substance abuse, and offensive Reddit posts were of less importance than defeating Mills. None of those justifications was ever sufficient.
It would be nice to believe that those who failed the test during the Platner campaign will learn from their mistake, but I am skeptical, particularly in today’s political environment. For those who apparently lacked the integrity to denounce contemptible candidates, the discernment to detect them, or the desire to do the right thing, might I offer a simple rule to assist—even just toward the pragmatic goal of selecting electable candidates. Prior to the Platner campaign, I would have thought this rule was common sense and easy to follow, but apparently it should be made explicit: Maybe, at a minimum, don’t support a candidate with a Nazi tattoo.