Graham Platner!

And the Myopia of the National Press Corps

Credit: The Nation

Extra, extra! What a letdown for Platner fans. Just as the national pundits warned, Mainers came out in droves yesterday to register a protest against his scandal-plagued dirtbag candidacy.

Wait. That didn’t happen. With 90 percent of the D primary vote in, as I write this, Platner, with 72 percent of the vote, is trouncing the sitting governor of Maine, Janet Mills, by 50 plus points. Yes, she had suspended her campaign, but she stayed on the ballot—and the reason she suspended her campaign was because the upstart nobody Graham Platner was wiping her out.

Call me not surprised. I’m wrong often enough, but I was right on this one. In my post of a week ago, on “Graham Platner’s Unbuttoned Authenticity,” I wrote that I suspected that Mainers “aren’t nearly as taken aback” by that widely-circulated Platner selfie, shirtless with a towel wrapped around his waist, as “as the National Media Priests at CNN et al are or purport to be.”

And so Maine D primary voters showed, in their resounding preference for Platner over Mills. Last night, I tuned in to Platner’s victory speech to his pumped-up backers. He gave them all the big juicy red chunks of meat they salivated for—ripping into his opponent in the general election, Susan Collins, as a Forever Washington politician married to a former lobbyist, her net worth skyrocketing into the millions over the course of her career. Gee, how does that happen?

Like him or loathe him, Platner is your basic Bernie Sanders’ Left Populist insurgent type. The goal is to take the Democratic Party away from the Establishment types and enact at long last an affordability agenda that takes on the billionaire class.

Maybe he is a Dirtbag Democrat. But he has a politician’s talent for “seeing” the pissed-off folks out there, with their grievances over the cost of health care and food and education and well, just about everything, it seems these days. Who doesn’t like to be seen? Bill Clinton had that talent as well, but I was never convinced that Clinton was a true populist. And indeed, once in office, he seemed to worry about fiscal deficits and the bond market as much as anything else. Full disclosure: I voted for Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in ‘96.

So Platner has his clean shot at Collins. Who could be an ideal foil for him. And we’ll see how it plays out. *On my prescience on this one: It helps to have been born in Maine? Or to now live, not in a media capital like Washington or New York, but on the breezy elbow of Cape Cod? I sail in a bay tilled by oyster farmers, was out there just this morning with the dog, so I’ll cop to liking that part of Platner’s resume.