Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Please note that it was recorded before Graham Platner’s Friday announcement that he is officially withdrawing his candidacy for the United States Senate. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
For the last month or so, we’ve heard nothing but “Graham Platner, Graham Platner, Graham Platner.” He is a quote-unquote “oyster man from Maine” that was a four-tour combat veteran, who the Democratic Party, Mr. [Morris] Katz, a very obscure 27-year-old activist, recruited for the Democratic Party to run against Susan Collins for the senior senator slot in Maine.
And he’s very controversial, as we all remember. After he declared his candidacy, we learned that he had smeared and slandered fellow veterans. He was on social media sites that usually were used by pedophiles and molesters. He had been married recently, yet he was sexting with two or three other women. One of his former girlfriends said he’d used violence to twist her arm. I could go on.
He had the Totenkopf “Death Head” tattoo and Nazi symbol of the 3rd Panzer Division and the Einsatzgruppen at the death camps of Germany.
But a new development happened this week when another person came forward and said that not just that she had her arm twisted and had been physically assaulted, but she said she was raped.
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And then everything started to change. And what caused this change? Because remember one thing: All of these terrible things I just reviewed about Graham Platner were known to the left-wing voters of Maine, and they factored that in in the primary vote. And so much was their zeal for a socialist candidate—and he is a socialist, whether he declares himself that or not—or their hatred of Donald Trump, or their desire to get a Senate seat so they can maybe impeach and convict Donald Trump, I don’t know, but they were fine with that.
But two recent developments occurred when the Democratic Party said you may be fine and you may have given him 70% of the primary vote, but we’re going to stop this. But even they were not bothered with all the things I reviewed and recited. So, what happened?
No. 1, the latest person is a Democrat, a liberal Democrat. They can’t smear her as they did the prior one, who was a conservative, as acting out of political motivations. So, that was a change. She got more credibility.
She was known for a long time. They had banked her and thought that she might be useful to end his candidacy if more things came out. So, when she went to Politico and gave her story, a left-wing organization and media outlet, the Democratic Party acted because of the second factor that changed everything.
He had been seven or eight points ahead in the polls, and then he started to descend with these revelations, and now he was either even or descending, and they were afraid he was going to lose that seat. So suddenly, they got religion, so to speak, and they demanded that he get off.
And he gave a taped 11-minute confessional, not about that he was culpable, but that he was going to suspend—suspend his campaign.
Notice what I said. I didn’t say end, quit. He didn’t say that. He’s got about five days from the time I’m talking to formally get his name off the ballot, according to election law in Maine. If he doesn’t, it stays on the ballot, even if the Democrats nominate another candidate and it won’t matter. He’s still on the ballot.
And I think that’s why he said he was going to suspend. In other words, he’s telling the Democratic apparat, you took me off, and I’m not going to go so easily. I’m going to put my finger in the wind in the next four or five days, six days, and see how people feel. They may feel I’m another Al Franken, where they “MeToo’d” Al Franken because of that grotesque picture where he put his hand on the breast of a sleeping woman, and then they found out that they were going to lose that seat, and they regretted it.
So, Graham Platner is basically saying, the people want me, and I think the socialist movement of your party wants me, and you overshot. And I’m not going to quit yet until I can feel where the momentum and the power is in the next few days.
There’s another factor to remember. He is a vindictive person. He suffers 100% disability. He’s on complete federal disability. I think that’ll be the first senator in U.S. Senate history to go to the White House with 100% disability from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In other words, he is deemed unstable enough to warrant a full medical pension.
He’s got a mean streak in him, and I don’t think he’s going to be going out like the usual Democratic, backroom coups operate. Remember, Joe Biden, when they thought in 2020 that Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders were going to have too far a Left-socialist brand, one of them might be the candidates. They said, out, out, out. Good old Joe Biden from Scranton, he’s going to be our waxen effigy. He has a moderate facade.
And they basically select him, even though he had lost the first two primary caucuses and votes.
And then, of course, they did the same thing to get rid of him. You live by the coup, you die by the coup. So, Joe Biden had a bad debate. His dementia was no longer possible to be disguised. They thought they were going to lose. He was behind in the polls. They got rid of him in a backroom coup.
They did it with Eric Swalwell. He was starting to ascend in the primary race for the gubernatorial Democratic nomination. They decided that there was a lot of stuff in his background that might hurt them. He might, in a general election, lose to Steve Hilton, so they got rid of him, and that’s what they do.
But this is a different case. He’s not predictable. He’s not one of them. And so, he does have cards to play.
He can say, I’m going to keep my name on the ballot no matter what, even if I suspend my campaign, and then you try to get a write-in candidate and see how that works for you. I will split the Democratic vote, and this will boomerang on you. So, he has a lot of cards to play.
But finally, what is the Platner problem? How did a nepo baby, who was quite affluent —his father is a well-known Maine lawyer, his mother owns a restaurant—his father, helped him and gave him property, or through a friend, for his oyster farm to perform. He only makes $5,000 a year. His only client is his mother’s upscale restaurant. He is not a working-class person.
But Mr. Katz and all these young 20-something operatives know that this agenda, this socialist agenda that they love—open borders, no difference between citizenship and residency, Green New Deal, anti-Israel, there’s elements of antisemitism, DEI, DEI, DEI, confiscate property, tax unrealized profits and net worth—I could go on. Nobody wants it.
So, they have to disguise it like they did in 2020 with Joe Biden. But the problem is they don’t have any working-class white people that look authentic, so they do silly things.
Pete Buttigieg grows a beard, wears a Caterpillar hat, wears a puff working vest, and suddenly he’s supposed to be working class until he opens his mouth and he comes off as a sanctimonious, self-righteous elite?
Or they’re looking around for James Talarico as sort of the working-class Christian, or the Christian everyman who’s down to earth, and we find out he’s got all sorts of bizarre ideas about transgenderism and gay this and sexuality and the Bible, and he’s a far-left kook.
And now we see Graham Platner. He looked authentic. He was putting out videos with his oyster garb on. They thought, well, this is a working man, a vet. We’re going to get the middle class, and we can still fool them and get our socialist agenda.
And then he turned out to be a complete nut.
What would be the easiest thing to do?
The easiest thing to do would be to go back and call up Bill Clinton—not the latest Bill Clinton, but the earlier Bill Clinton—and say how did you win in ’92 and ’96?
And he would tell them that he moderated on the issues, and he really appealed as an authentic person from the working class. And if they did that, they wouldn’t have to disguise an unacceptable socialist agenda through pseudo working-class people like Graham Platner.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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