Stop Making Excuses

If you supported Graham Platner, own your error - stop acting like the candidate and blaming everyone else.

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I really look forward to never thinking about Graham Platner again. However, a lot of Democrats are still refusing to engage in the moral reckoning that his political rise and fall require.

For example, writing in New York magazine, Rebecca Traister — like so many of Platner’s former stans — can’t do the hard work of looking in the mirror.

According to Traister, the women who supported Platner cannot be held to account, because after all, they really cared about women.

Anxiety about Platner’s personal misdeeds, which included revelations that he had a Nazi-ish tattoo, was outweighed by recognition of Mills’s weaknesses and the vast damage done by five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins, a woman who has enabled accused assaulters, including Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, to hurt not only individual women but millions of them. And yes, the fact that many women supported Platner because they cared so much about women makes this juncture extra enraging, heartbreaking, and horrible.

Traister’s ability to divine the precise reasons why Maine women supported Platner is nothing if not impressive. But even more amazing is her argument that Platner’s female supporters cared so much about women, all the while ignoring the many news stories that he was a) cheating on his wife by sexting with as many as a dozen women, b) suggested in a Reddit post that women who got drunk and were raped by men bore some responsibility, and c) physically assaulted an ex-girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield. Traister refers to the latter accusation as a “bad experience with Platner” … a bad experience that included Platner twisting Fifield’s arm behind her back, shoving her into a bedroom, and holding the door so she couldn’t get out. But remember, Platner’s female supporters really cared so much about women.

Keep in mind that 6 years ago, Traister penned a piece for New York magazine giving credence to Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual misconduct against Joe Biden — and argued that nominating him for president would put Democratic women in the impossible position of defending a candidate who might be a sexual predator. That Traister endorsed Reade’s accusations (which ultimately fell apart because of Reade’s utter lack of credibility) but waved away Platner’s litany of bad behavior toward women is a good reminder of the moral test that so many Democrats failed with Platner.

Traister, who was a self-acknowledged “critic” of Biden, was willing to believe Tara Reade, one can assume in part, because she didn’t like his politics.

But she believed Platner’s denial or his claims of personal maturity because, as she writes, he was “terrific” and “he sounded so much like some of the female politicians I have believed in and who have lost again and again and again.”

One might think, after being this bad a judge of character, Traister might let this one go, or at the very least hold herself accountable for it … but think again.

What’s a girl to do? Give a guy a break? Or not give him a break? Anyone who pretends Platner’s candidacy represented an easy moral and philosophical calculation is wrong. Figuring out how to maintain moral clarity is awfully hard in a world where half the potential political candidates start with a gender disadvantage and the other half are raised in a world that accustoms them to power over female bodies.

In our political system, women are too often forced to depend on men. And those men often catastrophically fail us. Which brings us to whatever happens next: We are in an emergency. Caused by Graham Platner. And, honestly, by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was criminally negligent in clearing the field for Mills, a candidate who was wrong for the moment, rather than one who could have offered a legitimate alternative to Platner.

It seems quite possible that the candidate chosen to replace Platner will be a woman. A woman who will be asked, as Kamala Harris was two years ago, to mount a terribly difficult campaign in a terribly short amount of time — knowing that no story about her will ever be told just about her but rather about her in relation to the men who got us into this mess in the first place.

In reality, Graham Platner’s candidacy presented a very easy moral and philosophical calculation, unless, as was seemingly the case with so many of his supporters, you were willing to ignore Platner’s Nazi tattoo, his obvious lies about it, his made-up working-class narrative, his boorish behavior toward women, etc. This wasn’t a hard call — and yet Traister and so many other Democrats failed it.

Rather than acknowledge fault, Traister places equal blame on Platner AND Chuck Schumer for the criminally negligent decision to recruit Maine Governor Janet Mills to run for the Maine Senate seat.

Putting aside the fact that Graham Platner might actually be criminally negligent for sexual assault in Maine, creating an equivalency between Platner, who is credibly accused of sexual assault and ran for office knowing that such accusations could derail his nomination, and Schumer is disgusting. One person is responsible for the “emergency” in Maine — and it’s Graham Platner.

Actually, let me take that back. The others responsible, in Traister’s words, for getting “us into this mess” are not “men,” as she suggests. They are the women and men who allowed their ideological and political devotion to trump their moral integrity.

As I wrote the other day, Platner’s candidacy was a moral test for Democrats. The arguments against his candidacy — both political and moral — were not difficult to discern. They were readily available. Too many people ignored them … and rather than acknowledge it, they are making excuses.

I tell my kids all the time: every one of us makes mistakes. We all screw up. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be human. But it’s how we handle those errors, in judgment or in action, that defines us. Holding yourself personally accountable is the ultimate flex. When you’re refusing to take responsibility and blaming others for your mistakes, you’re telling on yourself.

One More Thing …

• Platner has officially dropped out.

Musical Interlude