Is Graham Platner Fit to Be a US Senator?

For a week, I’ve watched the commentators and the party line up to tell me Graham Platner is too compromised for the United States Senate. Last night, the Democrats of Maine answered them. He’s on track to win his primary with about 72 percent of the vote, carrying nearly every county in the state. This is not the outcome for a candidate distrusted by the voters; in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a landslide.

Every time I hear a pundit call his behavior “disqualifying,” or read another opinion piece about the horrendous human being that is Graham Platner, I can’t help thinking about the people already in the Senate. How are they handling power? Are they showing us the upright moral high ground?

While Israel was dropping white phosphorus on people in Lebanon, The New York Times called it a munition that “can be extremely harmful.” White phosphorus burns through skin to the bone. They called it “harmful.” Like cholesterol. Like skipping the gym.

This is the same paper that spent two months interviewing women who dated Graham Platner, hunting for something disqualifying. White phosphorus on civilians gets “can be extremely harmful.” Graham’s private life gets a microscope.

The media and the Democratic establishment have been scouring his personal struggles and trying to equate them with his fitness to serve. Relationships that ended badly. Texts he regrets. The years he spent drinking, trying to outrun what he brought home from Ramadi and Fallujah. He’s a Marine who came back with PTSD and a drinking problem and did the work to come out the other side. That’s not a disqualification. In most of America, that’s the story of a man growing up. But run for office as a regular guy, and every private wound becomes a headline.

And all that pressure has made him into something rare. He’s already survived the worst they can do to a person out in the open, which means there’s nothing left to hold over his head. You can’t blackmail a man whose flaws are already on the table, and you can’t scare him off a fight by threatening to expose him.

Sure, sexting with a woman while you’re married isn’t admirable. But that has never been the test of whether someone can be trusted with power.

The test is how you conduct yourself when you have it. And by that test, the Senate Platner wants to join is morally bankrupt. The senators our media holds up as the moral, dignified ones get to sit in a hearing and debate the merits of binding our military and our intelligence even tighter to a government that’s carrying out a genocide, and that gets called sober and serious. Just policy. Just pragmatism. Working hand in hand with people committing war crimes gets called statesmanship.

Chuck Schumer voted for the war in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people died. He leads the Senate Democrats now, and he’s never once had to sit where Platner’s sitting. He keeps his leadership and his reputation as a statesman because he didn’t personally drop the bomb. He was just part of the machine that did, and nobody in the machine is ever responsible. And it isn’t just him. Dozens of them, in both parties, voted for that war or funded the ones that came after, and not one has answered for a single death. Platner, though. Platner pressed “Send.” Platner was “unsettling.”

I don’t feel betrayed by Platner. I feel betrayed by the people sitting in judgment of him. John Yoo wrote the legal memos that authorized torture, and he teaches law at Berkeley, and the same crowd that finds that perfectly normal clutches its pearls over a man’s text messages. Half the Senate calls itself moral because they never yelled at a girlfriend, while they vote to arm and fund the killing of tens of thousands of children.