Teflon Platner?
Maine Lobster roll, butter, mayo, or teflon
I now live in a tiny town in Maine across the river from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I joke that I escaped across the frozen Piscataqua one step ahead of a howling right-wing mob. I even wrote a song to commemorate the frozen flight. Maine has a Democratic Governor, a slim majority of Democrats in the state legislature, one independent US Senator who votes with the Democrats and Republican Susan Collins. Collins has effectively coated herself with political Teflon for years. She poses as a moderate. Folks in Maine have largely ignored her alliances with all sorts of reprehensible parties and a solid right wing voting record in favor of the bacon she’s brought home year after year. Until this year, I found Maine politics somewhat less eccentric than the scene in New Hampshire, where we had lived for more than forty years and where I served as a US Congressman. That’s changed with this year’s race for the United State Senate and the entry of Graham Platner to the political scene.
The Maine/NH Seacoast is a pretty close community. The other day, after my band played a gig in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a member of the audience sat me down to ask me what I thought of Graham Platner. I was diplomatic in my response which she appreciated. Then she told me she was Graham Platner’s Aunt! Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Maine is a political wrecking ball. He’s breaking taboos. He’s bucking establishment expectations. He’s breaking some hearts. He’s also breaking records for apologies and explanations for his behavior.
The Right has stepped up attacks as Platner’s personal imbroglios have mounted and leaked into the public sphere. By now the current litany is pretty well known. Bad tattoo, stupid blunt offensive comments or terms used about women, a fellow service member, disabled people, gay people, sexting while married. He grew up privileged in a solidly middle-class family. His Dad was a lawyer and he went to private school but he’s campaigning as the friend of the working man..an oyster farmer, harbormaster, small business guy who blasts the millionaires and billionaires for America’s ills. As the Free Press recently reported “ Democratic voters in Maine didn’t care about Platner’s Reddit account, the tattoo, or complaints that he was a rich kid LARPing as working class.”
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Maybe Dupont Teflon has become a traditional Maine thing like lobster rolls, coating Maine politicians left and right. Maybe Platner, who kicked his Democratic opponent, 78 year old Governor Janet Mills to the curb, has figured something out. The way our politics has changed, not only coats his Carhartt coat with Teflon, but gives him an advantage as a “real” person, a guy just like us with warts and flaws and issues like ours.
So the matchup is Teflon Collins vs. Teflon Platner. Platner was likely told before he entered the race that his life would be an open book. Just as likely he said “fuck it” and decided to run any way. Talking about changed politics,Let’s be fair. We’re being led or misled by a President who is a doddering, demented, pedophile, corrupt felon… a sweetheart of a guy who bragged about catching women by the pussy, serially cheated on his wives, doesn’t give a fig about the rule of law or political norms and was re-elected a second time! So, yeah, our politics has changed. None of the storm of controversy around Platner’s private life have much to do with his populist policies, which focus on the real challenges of our health care system, the unaffordability of our consumer society, the plight of a hollowed out working class. So, one might ask: Does Character matter in politics?
Republicans have seemingly paid little to no attention about personal peccadillos. Viz Ken Paxton and DJT. Democrats are different. We like to think we have higher standards of political behavior. We get all hung up on “character”. I suppose one could argue that Platner’s true character is revealed in his acknowledgement and acceptance of his personal flaws. The media, social and traditional, is having a field day with Platner. Nothing like the whiff of scandal to sell, papers, airtime, subscriptions, likes, whatever. That said, since Platner is an unknown political quantity and he’s blasted off so hot, it’s natural for media and the right wing political establishment to dig around, root up and in this case, use anything they have to try to stop the train. Will Maine care as little as Maine voters seem to care about personal “character” or behavior? Dunno. Platner is up 9 points over Collins in recent polling. Will Independent unaligned voters, a political force in Maine, and a few Republicans swing his way notwithstanding the personal turmoil?
Focusing on the Platner personal chaos allows the bad guys to argue that he’s unfit for office without ever having to defend the indefensible Susan Collins. Platner must have known or certainly was told that ALL his personal shit would be open book..the tattoo, the sexting...the off the cuff embarrassing comments...the diatribe against a fellow serviceman. Maybe In this day and age all that is simply is beside the point. Maybe voters are willing to forgive and accept Platner’s rolling redemption and the seriatum video apologies and explanations. Dems take note: Platner is staunchly against an assault weapons ban. Ah well, After all, he’s a Mainer who owns real flannel, not a red and black shirt-jac rented from LL Bean.
Friends, we’re not after perfection here. We’re after a Democrat in the United States Senate. There’s a long way between here and November. So far, Platner’s brash, blunt brand of politics harkens back to the populist agenda of the 1930’s. He’s been befriended by Bernie and Elizabeth while more “moderate” Democrats like Cory Booker have expressed “concern”. But National Democrats are faced with a conundrum. The Democrats convinced Mills to run only to see her run over by the Platner train. The rising stars of the Party, Mamdami, Platner, AOC, are pulling hard to the left. Young voters in particular are lining up in Maine behind Platner in droves. Yet, recent reporting suggest that on a national scale, voters are looking for representation that is more “moderate”. What does that even mean in the age of Trump?
Our country now faces an existential crisis. Can a nation where “All men are created equal” and Government is “Of the people, by the people and for the people” survive the corruption and chaos of an autocratic regime bent on undermining all we have held dear? What does recovery look like when the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise in the federal government is compounded by the normalization of totally abhorrent and abnormal behavior in political offices. Add to these challenges a cornucopia of climate change, AI, wealth disparity, global war and the 21st century shapes up to be a corker.
Maybe Platner has a vision for America that overrides all else. Maybe telling it like it is and demanding a bold new politics which actually addresses the problems faced by ordinary Americans is the articulation of a new direction to reverse decades of regressive politics. The 21st century challenges we face cry out for a comprehensive vision from our political leaders. We need more than a political agenda, more than a menu of policies, more than incrementalism from the political leadership of both parties. One could forcefully argue that the Republicans are clear about their vision…Autocracy, supremacy of the Executive, oligarchy, cronyism, survival of the most corrupt. Gobsmacked by Trump and Trumpism, and focused on his evils, I have yet to hear ANY Democrat articulate a forward-looking, comprehensive, and hopeful vision for our national future.
It just may be that for all his pecadillos, Graham Platner, warts and all, represents a new kind of old-fashioned Democrat. Perfectly imperfect, passionate, blunt, tough, big-hearted, and authentic. For better or worse, richer or poorer, Maine Democrats have their candidate. He has 2000 active volunteers in York County alone. He’s building a grassroots organization not seen since Obama. He’s working hard and drawing huge crowds. You may criticize him for his past but right now, he’s a teflon man on fire and Mainers are responding positively.
Great read, Paul, well said. Plattner’s flaws bother me a bit, but not nearly as much as they would have prior to Trump. I think the questions about his character stop dead in their tracks after “Does he have any felony convictions?” (No)
Been thinking about your 2006 campaign and how once again I’ve realized that yelling at my TV isn’t gonna change anything. Living in severely gerrymangled NC now and have hooked up with a heavy Dem underdog in district 9, Richard Ojeda. He’s up against 7-term incumbent Trump puppet Richard Hudson, the chair of the RCCC. I have borrowed your slogan from 2006, which was as I recall “When I go to Washington as your Congressman, I’m taking my backbone with me!”
Paul, this is well written and funny in all the right places, but I kept tripping over the structure of the argument, not the anecdotes.
On the front half, you lay out a set of behaviors which, in any other context, Democratic rhetoric has told us are disqualifying: ugly comments about women and disabled people, slurs about a fellow serviceman, sexting while married, the whole Reddit mess. If a Republican with Platner’s record were running against Susan Collins, your own description of Trump and Paxton makes it pretty clear what we’d call him.
But by the end, those same behaviors have been reclassified as “warts and flaws,” raw material for “rolling redemption,” and crucially, as proof of his authenticity. Platner becomes a “new kind of old‑fashioned Democrat… perfectly imperfect, passionate, blunt, tough, big‑hearted and authentic.” The fact that he (1) is on “our” side in the current existential drama and (2) draws big crowds now functions not as a reason to interrogate how we got here, but as a reason to suspend the very standards you invoked when describing Trump.
In other words: the problem is not that Republicans don’t care about character while Democrats do. The problem is that both parties now treat “character” as a floating variable to be dialed up or down depending on whether the sinner is useful to them. When Trump’s sins are in the dock, every old‑fashioned sermon about decency and the rule of law gets dusted off. When Platner’s are, those same instincts are recoded as uptightness about “perfection” in an age of crisis.
If we really are in an existential moment, that ought to be the point where our moral language tightens, not loosens. You describe, quite accurately, a political ecosystem in which institutional knowledge has been hollowed out, norms have been shredded, and the stakes are high. The response, in this piece, is to say: given all that, we should shrug at Platner’s personal conduct because he’s saying the right things about health care, billionaires and the working class—and, crucially, because he’s up nine in the polls. That is exactly the “win at all costs” logic you just condemned on the other side of the aisle.
It may well be that Maine Democrats are going to nominate him no matter what and that he’ll beat Collins. That’s a political fact. What I’m less sure about, after reading this, is whether there’s any consistent account of why his behavior was disqualifying in a Republican but is now being woven into a story of authenticity and redemption in a Democrat. If the standard has changed, we should say that honestly: “We’ve decided that as long as someone is on the right side of our existential fight, the old character rules are suspended.”
Maybe that’s where we’re headed. But if that’s the move, then the real difference between Platner and Trump isn’t that one side still cares about character and the other doesn’t; it’s that each side has now found its own way of explaining why their flawed champion is the necessary exception.