A pair of socialist candidate recruiters had their eyes on an alternative to Graham Platner when they began looking for a good suspect to run against five-term U.S. GOP Sen. Susan Collins.
Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancé, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley, first sought out a union leader at Bath Iron Works.
That’s according to a new report in the New York Post.
The pair had originally met while working for Bernie Sanders in 2020 and are hardcore members of the Democrat Socialists of America.
When Moraff and Fan came to Maine last summer on a recruiting trip they considered the union organizer but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet,” according to Politico.
(Must’ve been a pretty big skeleton to trump the many since found in Platner’s closet.)
The pair had first gotten wind of Platner through the local Democrat socialist network, where he had been active.
He had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine.
They sent to Platner’s mother’s restaurant near Sullivan , Maine, where he lives, and interviewed him.
“After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate,” according to Post reporter Chadwick Moore.
They “groomed rich kid Graham Platner into a ‘working-class’ candidate,” the headline on Moore’s story says.
After scandals started to compound, including revelations Platner made Reddit posts which downplayed sexual assault, defended U.S. soldiers desecrating Taliban corpses and alluded to familiarity with prostitutes, Moraff and Fan weren’t discouraged.
In fact they were energized.
In Platner they saw the imperfect – just what they wanted to appeal to average working stiffs.
“The more scandals that engulf Platner and the more centrist outrage he can stoke, the better, as it gets more stories written and drowns out his opponent in November,” Moore writes.
The subliminal magic of creating the “personal personna” of a bad-boy underdog ensures that Platner will survive, according to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
As it turns out, transforming a rich kid who went to boarding school and whose lawyer daddy helped him buy his first house into an average, everyday American who degrades women, cops, rural Mainers and has a Nazi tattoo is the socialists’ idea of a menu promising political success.
Steve Robinson, editor-in-chief of The Maine Wire, told Fox News that Platner the self-described “oyster man” says all that needs to be said about the Sullivan native.
“There are oyster farms and oyster farmers but there’s no such thing as an ‘oyster man,'” Robinson, a Maine native, told Fox’s Laura Ingraham. “The whole thing is a campaign prop.”
Robinson said Platner created the oyster gimmick only after he started the website for a Senate campaign.
Ironically, Moore sees the fake oyster farm as an example of the consultants intentionally drowning out substantive political-policy discussions Collins will attempt as the general election nears in November.
The interviewers read him a line of script written by some social anarchist action hate group from California .
Graham Platner was able to recite it back to them word for word without pause .
The interviewers looked at each other and said ….” He’s OUR Boy . “
“ We will call him Oyster Man ! “ …….they exclaimed .
And so Maine’s and the Country’s future became threatened .