The Platner Dilemma
Where's the line where you start drawing lines?
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I’m on record saying that I would vote for Graham Platner (if things went disastrously wrong for me and I ended up living in Maine). I’m also on record calling Platner “an edgelord asshole” and “a bottomless pit of douchey behavior” whose ideas are “a bunch of misguided nothing”. I frankly wouldn’t hire the guy to work at Blimpie’s, but, oddly, I’d vote for him to be a US Senator.
Many Democrats — six of whom actually live in Maine — are wrestling with The Platner Dilemma. Massachusetts Representative Jake Auchincloss recently called Platner’s covered-up totenkopf tattoo1 “disqualifying”. That, of course, helps Platner’s opponent, Susan Collins. Auchincloss’ statement led to blowback from people who noted that Collins treats Trump the way a lazy parent treats a toddler: She stands up to the shithead one time in 50 and thinks that counts as “setting boundaries”.
Does “vote blue no matter who” literally mean no matter who? Like literally anybody — if Platner blew up a school bus, would some people say “yeah, but he didn’t vote to confirm RFK Junior”? Isn’t that just “Flight 93” logic, i.e. “the other side is always worse”? And isn’t that logic what made it possible for Trump to treat American laws the way he treats Tiffany, i.e. with something between complete disregard and outright hostility?
But also: Aren’t purity tests a fast track to irrelevance? After all: What if Collins blew up a school bus — would Auchincloss still feel that Platner’s tattoo is “disqualifying”? Politics requires compromises, and anyone who doesn’t understand that should go meditate on a mountain so that they can be as pure and useless as they aspire to be.
This Platner situation sure is a corker! Here’s my two cents.
Much of the anger towards Auchincloss comes from leftists, who are incredulous that after a lifetime of centrist Democrats urging them to cast pragmatic votes, some centrists are balking at Platner. Of course, the situations are different for two reasons.
The first reason is that Auchincloss and others are objecting to Platner’s specific…let’s call them “quirks” (and if that doesn’t win me the Nobel Prize for Euphemisms, nothing will). No mainstream Democrat drew a line at Bernie or AOC or Elizabeth Warren or any other far-left congressional Democrat, but none of them have tattoos that are too-Nazi-adjacent-for-comfort. And, sure: Warren has a huge tattoo of a skateboarding iguana with “BLINK 182 4 LIFE” on her back, and Bernie got his confederate flag face tattoo removed in 2015, but that’s different from having a totenkopf on your chest for 20 years and also going on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist’s podcast and saying “I love your show”.
