It isn’t clear what effect, if any, Graham Platner’s multiplying personal scandals will have on his chances in the Maine Democratic primary that’s occurring as I write this, to say nothing of November’s general election against Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican senator. But there are at least two good, if contradictory, possibilities.
The first is absolution — not only for Platner, but for every nominee or candidate, Republican or Democratic, with a blemished personal history — on the grounds that we elect or install people in high office to achieve the results we desire, not to serve as paragons of moral rectitude. If nothing else, this could make our politics less repellent to talented if imperfect people who now steer clear of public service because they don’t want to put themselves or their families through the inevitable media inquisition that comes with every campaign.
The second is consistent judgment of anyone, Democrat or Republican, who falls far short of clear and unyielding standards of moral conduct. Perhaps this will finally re-erect the political barriers that formerly prevented shameless people, our current president not least, from degrading our politics and setting a putrescent example of what is — and what isn’t — necessary to reach the high places of American life.
What ought to stop is what we have now: inconsistent standards selectively applied according to our political bias.
Lest you’ve been wintering in Antarctica, here’s what’s lately been learned about Platner, the 41-year-old combat veteran and oyster farmer:
That his wife had told a campaign aide that he had been trading sexually explicit messages with six women, and perhaps as many as a dozen, before the beginning of his political run. That a former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that he lied when he claimed he did not know a chest tattoo he had gotten during his military service strongly resembled an official insignia of the Nazi SS, and that he had once referred to it as “my Totenkopf.” That Fifield also alleges that he had once “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out” and that she later described him as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth.” That she said he referred to women as “hatchet wounds,” using a crude word for female genitalia. That other women romantically connected to Platner also described unsettling behavior.
Fifield also told The Times this: “He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” adding that he told her it would be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way. He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”
Disqualifying? Platner has rejected some of the allegations and acknowledged others, all the while trying to put them in the context of the emotionally turbulent period amid and after multiple deployments. OK, uh-huh, maybe.
Less OK is to watch some of the same progressives who thought that Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged misbehavior as a teenager and a college student made him unfit for the Supreme Court suddenly become dismissive of the allegations against Platner. “Seems like a lot of nothing,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who once thundered over the meaning of the word “ralph” in Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook. Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also been notably agnostic when it comes to the charges against their Maine favorite. What ever happened to #BelieveWomen?
The term for this is “double standard,” if not outright hypocrisy, and among the consequences is that it merely fuels the pervasive national cynicism about any moral judgments made about any political leader. If Platner can pass muster among Democratic primary voters, then the differences between him and Donald Trump are mainly of degree, not of kind. You may still agree with Platner’s politics, and if you’re in Maine, you may still think he’s a better choice than Collins.
What you can no longer do, at least not with any intellectual integrity, is to use moral litmus tests to try to disqualify political figures from the opposing party. To be fine with Platner, knowing what you know now, should also require burying #MeToo in the graveyard of discarded progressive shibboleths.
There’s an alternative: Democrats can operate according to the standards they have set, the ones they’ve sought to apply to Trump and his epigones. They can live by the view that no election is so important that they’re willing to discard the things they once fervently claimed to believe in order to win it. They can hold themselves accountable so that they can more credibly and effectively hold their opponents accountable. They can cherish the idea that what counts in politics is more than just a relentless quest for a majority, and for power, and that staying true to principle isn’t just a game for suckers. They can refuse to follow the president into the moral tar pit in which he long ago sank the Republican Party.
As this column goes to press, the honorable and perfectly respectable governor of Maine, Janet Mills, remains on the Democratic primary ballot. There’s still a choice for Democratic voters to make — and honest conclusions to draw from it.
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