Graham Platner

My two cents

I look forward to the day when politics is boring again, where you don’t get elected to something like U.S. senator or president until you’ve actually got elected to something before, learned how government works, and have established a public record.

But that’s not the world we live in. People don’t trust the establishment, so they don’t trust the people who have come up through it. Anybody, anybody, but a conventional politician is acceptable. So deeply flawed candidates like Donald Trump or a Graham Platner are what you get.

Am I saying they’re equivalent? No. At least I don’t think so. I agree with Platner on the issues. I take seriously Bernie’s endorsement. But he’s a pig in a poke, and nobody really knows what they’re getting with him.

And that’s the problem isn’t it? If a candidate doesn’t have a record, we tend to project onto him or her what we want or hope them to be. And we only find out later what they really are. (Or don’’t as, to my astonishment, the American electorate did not after the first four years of Trump.) Our fantasies about who these unknown and untested candidates are are so much more interesting and attractive than are the candidacies of the people we already know, who are boring and whose record is soiled by their actually doing hard work in the political trenches. In such candidates we think we’re getting something new and fresh, but we’re not. We elected Obama with such a hope, but got Rahm Emmanuel and the Wall Street establishment. Better than anything the the godawful Republicans could put up, but still pretty awful.

The bottom line is that the system is broken and so until it gets fixed, whenever that might be, we are forced to choose among broken or deeply flawed or compromised candidates who must play by the broken system’s rules. We make the best prudential judgments we can, but we shouldn’t expect too much from even the best candidates. The zeitgeist now is chaos, and in such moments It’s much easier to destroy something old than to build something new.

So if slowing the pace of the destruction and containing the chaos is what you think is important, then it’s important that the Dems win the House and Senate this fall, but neither Platner nor anybody else is going accomplish much until there’s a shift in the zeitgeist. Is a candidate like Platner a harbinger of such a shift? Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s a symptom of the chaos, not a cure for it. But if I lived in Maine, I’d probably vote for him.