On June 9, Graham Platner won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senate from Maine with 72.1% of the primary vote. On July 10, Platner withdrew from the race, presumably due to popular demand by the same voters who nominated him.

I’m tempted to a bit of schadenfreude toward those voters.

This was not a case of “seems like a really good guy, very consistent, upright citizen … oh my God, I had no idea!”

Platner’s entire short political career — his whole adult life, in fact — resembles a locomotive, on fire, pulling boxcars stuffed full of dynamite, accelerating down tracks that terminate at a children’s playground.

While the final straw was an allegation of rape, it’s not like he hadn’t already been credibly and multiple times been accused of poor behavior toward women, ranging from marital infidelity to physical assault.

Until the rape allegation, he was able to shrug that kind of thing off with a plea of PTSD from his military career. Speaking of which:

As a candidate, Platner told his opponent, US Senator Susan Collins, “You voted to send me to Iraq. Did you not learn anything from that experience?”

It’s a reasonable question, but it rings a little hollow from someone who wasn’t drafted, who joined up after the wars he fought had begun, and who kept coming back for more. Platner spent four years in the Marine Corps, then returned for four more in the National Guard, then worked as a mercenary (“security contractor”), for a total of three combat tours in Iraq and a six-month deployment to Afghanistan.

I’m sympathetic to veteran regret (got a bit of that myself), but it seems to have taken that regret a long time to develop despite  severe negative consequences, including the PTSD he tries to blame all his bad behavior on.

I guess Platner is a slow learner. It supposedly took him 19 years to figure out that he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

Or maybe, just maybe, Platner is an opportunist who figured, correctly, that Maine’s Democratic voters were gullible enough to overlook the obvious flaws in a candidate who sold himself as an “outsider” and a “populist.”

And that worked out … for a little while, anyway.

There’s an old saying: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”

Are voters honest? They keep falling for politicians who turn out to be even worse than average … and then complaining endlessly about it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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