A new analysis of a former Maine candidate for U.S. Senate says Democrat Graham Platner’s flaws were readily apparent but ignored.
Veteran political insider Maria Comella, a former top aide to both Democrat and Republican governors, says campaign consultants knew Platner was a powder keg but pushed his candidacy out of selfish motivation.
“Platner was just the latest product of a political system that most values winning, no matter how much our moral principles are compromised to get there,” Comella writes in Vanity Fair.
“ln search of a quick fix to the systemic issues within the Democratic Party, operatives pushed a candidate under the guise of authenticity,” she adds. “They learned that Platner is indeed authentic: authentically terrible on multiple counts.”
Platner handily won a June primary to take on U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a five-term Republican, despite growing concerns about his past, including alleged mistreatment of several women who knew him.
He quit the race a month later under pressure from party leaders following a claim by an ex-girlfriend that he had raped her five years earlier.
“As I watched his campaign’s slow-motion implosion, it struck me that it was just a culmination of an operative class having become increasingly cynical and self-motivated,” Comella says. “The consultant-on-consultant violence in its aftermath only confirms it, and anything else would be lies told to ourselves to make us feel better.”
“Supporters of Platner decided the end justified the means,” she adds. “That is, up until the point that their hand was forced with the latest allegation, which Platner has denied, and his candidacy was no longer viable.”
“There is a wayward consultant class that will back anyone to win because winning achieves personal ambitions for power and money,” Comella says. “As it turns out, politics is not a zero-sum game. It’s supposed to be in service to the American people.
“We’ve rarely seen anyone who is part of the political industrial complex take responsibility and say, ‘You know, maybe I am part of the reason we’re here.’”
