Within the next 48-72 hours, Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Maine, will drop out of the race to challenge moderate Republican incumbent Susan Collins and possibly tip the Senate in the Democrats' favor.
How in the name of all that is good and holy did the Democrats ever think Platner was a viable candidate? That same question was asked not too long ago, when Joe Biden was readying his re-election campaign. And the Democrats have yet to answer it.
In the summer of 2024, questions about Biden's competency and cognitive ability swirled around his campaign. For a time, friendly media tamped down the rumors and dismissed the evidence of Biden's decline, chalking it up to Republicans and conservatives exaggerating the president's deficiencies or outright lying about what anyone who was paying attention knew to be true; Joe Biden had no business running for re-election.
Biden's frightening confusion, including his referencing dead European leaders François Mitterrand of France (confusing him with Emmanuel Macron) and Helmut Kohl of Germany (confusing him with Angela Merkel), was shrugged off as mistakes anyone could make. Misidentifying cabinet members was explained as the president being "tired."
In a hastily arranged press conference to forcefully dispute the damaging characterizations of Biden made by special counsel Robert Hur in his report on the president's mishandling of classified documents, Biden mistakenly referred to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (the President of Egypt) as the "president of Mexico." The report itself alleged that during interviews, Biden struggled to remember the exact years he served as Vice President (asking, "If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice-president?") and was hazy on the timing of his son Beau’s death in 2015.
It wasn't until the June 2024 presidential debate that the full impact of Biden's unfitness for office hit home. By then, his confusion and cognitive decline could no longer be hidden or excused.
Why did it take Democrats so long to call for Biden's replacement on the ticket? Did they believe that a friendly media would run interference for the president indefinitely? Why did it take so many "last straws" for the Democratic establishment to give up and throw in the towel on Biden?
And why did they have the same reluctance to face reality in Platner's case, waiting so long to give him the boot?
Essentially, the answer to that question is not very flattering to the Democratic Party. Democrats are so contemptuous of the intelligence and judgment of the American people that they believe voters will accept any flaws in a candidate as long as they promise enough free stuff and paint Republicans as Hitler clones.
Platner was plucked from obscurity by Morris Katz, the top political strategist for New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” Katz recalled of his first meeting with Platner. Katz produced a campaign video of Platner — "A macho pastiche with a Jeep-commercial soundtrack, it shows him diving in his wetsuit, chopping wood, hauling oyster cages, and doing kettlebell swings," according to The New Yorker. "There are closeups of his tattoos, along with shots of him holding hands with his wife, Amy Gertner, as they walk along a beach with their two dogs.
Standing at the helm of his boat, Platner tells the camera, “When I tell people around here that I’m running for Senate, sometimes the initial reaction is, ‘What the ——?’ ” There’s a bleeped-out expletive, and Platner laughs. Then he gets serious: “It seems like the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians profiting off destroying our environment, driving our families into poverty, and crushing the middle class.”
The campaign rollout, which was orchestrated by Platner’s senior adviser, Joe Calvello (John Fetterman’s former director of communications), raised half a million dollars in its first four days; volunteer sign-ups for the campaign averaged three hundred a day. “No one was expecting this,” Calvello told me. The Times, ABC, NBC, and Fox News covered the launch, focussing on Platner as a political novice who represented a new approach for the Party. “Platner has never run for office and seldom wears a suit,” Mother Jones noted. The launch video was viewed more than two and a half million times on X in the first twenty-four hours alone. The streamer and leftist commentator Hasan Piker showed it on his Twitch channel, where comments included “TAX THE RICH AND EAT THE OYSTERS” and “Wow this guy looks like a progressive mind in [a] MAGA body.”
"A progressive mind in a MAGA body" reveals the truth about the Democrats' "reform" efforts and plan to recapture working-class whites. They want to create a candidate with the appearance of an average American but with toxic Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) views. They don't believe they can win unless they trick voters into thinking that because a candidate looks and sounds like them, the candidate believes in what they do — even when he doesn't.
Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic writes, "Katz and his allies have sought out candidates who are willing to castigate the Democratic Party for selling out the working class—which necessitates, or at least militates toward, candidates who have no experience inside the party," according to Chait. "And whereas this ideological orientation requires an intensity of commitment, it does not require a mastery of policy detail."
Katz decided that Platner was a viable candidate in the time it took to have a cup of coffee with him.
Dan Moraff, one of the strategists who helped select and vet Platner, “wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals,” The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Having a policy agenda that could fit comfortably on a Post-it note without omitting any important details certainly speeds up the process. Platner, indeed, has boiled down nearly all political problems to the perfidy of sinister oligarchs. Whatever the merits of this worldview, it does not demand much knowledge.
But a second, at least as important reason for Platner’s lightning-fast ratification was that he has the desired look for the part.
Superficiality like this only proves the contempt with which Democrats hold the voters they wish to govern. I'd like to say that this approach won't work, that Republicans will coast to victory in November, but you and I know there are too many Low Information Voters (LIVs) who would swallow this crap and pull the lever for the Democrats.
Related: Americans Have Hated America Since Our Founding. That's One of the Things That Makes Us Exceptional.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its socialist agenda.
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