THE MAINE THING

It looks like Graham Platner is gone, but the Democrats' real problem isn't going away ...

Well, the dog finally caught the car in Maine.

Since Graham Platner burst on the scene a year ago announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, he has crisscrossed the Pine Tree State telling uncomfortable truths about America’s broken political system, and making enemies on both sides of the spectrum doing it.

Controversy has followed the combat vet for the past year, but so too, have thousands and thousands of supporters in Maine who nominated him to run against the despicable Republican, Susan Collins, in a key Senate race in November.

Since ascending to the Senate in 1996, the oily Collins has been clobbering one establishment Democrat after another in a state that has a proud history of distrusting the establishment. You have to live in Maine to understand Maine, and the problem is that too many people don’t.

From their rooftop perch in the northeast corner of the country Mainers literally look down on the rest of the United States. This doesn’t make them haughty, it makes them properly suspicious.

Either you are from Maine or are from Away.

It looks like the latest allegations that Platner sexually assaulted a woman five years ago, are going to be the end of his run, but I promise you that the voters I have talked to there the past 24 hours, want more information on this before they drop their support — no matter what the people from Away say.

And look, I’m not going to sit here and try to have my cake while wolfing it down, too. I endorsed Platner last October, but I believe the time has come for him to drop out, because men have to stop thinking they can assault women and suffer no consequences for it.

I hung on with Platner for as long as I could because he and people like him are the answer to greatest political question of our times in America: How in the hell do we get rid of all this money polluting our election system?

We have to do that, of course, because even our radical Right “Supreme” Court majority has proven it is completely bought and paid for by America’s oligarchy.

Which is why it needs to be blown to smithereens — which is another answer to another vitally important question we can talk about another time.

Platner connected with the people of Maine, who were not going to just blindly say yes to Chuck Schumer and the Democratic elites’ from Away foisting the state’s 77-year-old governor, Janet Mills, on them to take on and lose badly to Susan Collins.

Those elites can say they were right about Platner now, but that is a lot of double-talking coming from people who say they want change, but have rolled out of the rack each day for the past three decades or so doing exactly the same thing.

This started with Bill Clinton, and because life is often a circle, Clinton was elected as president in 1992 when I was working at a newspaper in central Maine. Just four years later, Collins was elected to the Senate in the state.

Clinton’s mostly gone, but Collins has stayed … and stayed … and stayed …

God only knows how many people Bill slept with outside his marriage, but at the time that wasn't much of an issue to the giggly party establishment who still rule the party now. Hell, back then they were only too happy to normalize a 49-year-old man copping a blowjob in the Oval Office from a 22-year-old intern.

I don’t think myself a prude, but any guy who did this to one of my daughters would be eating through a straw for the rest of his life.

I admittedly never liked Bill Clinton because I don’t like most politicians, and because it was just so easy to see he was completely full of shit. He was a gifted speaker, smart as a whip, had a boatload of charisma, and most importantly: was a contrast to the stodgy Republican dinosaurs like George Bush Sr., and Bob Dole who no longer fit into anything in America. Both men served their country honorably and in war, but even that has an end date in politics.

Or used to …

Long way of saying the Democratic Party long ago turned into something they used to warn everybody else about, and are stale as month-old bread these days.

They say they want change but have absolutely no idea how to get it. So when a guy like Platner comes along … or another guy like Zohran Mamdani comes along … or a woman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes along … they say, “Yeah, yeah, fine. But NOT them.”

This is exactly what happened in 2016 when Bernie Sanders burst on the scene.

Let me tell you where I was politically in 2016 as Barack Obama was wrapping up his two terms: Feeling proud I had supported him twice, pretty good about the country, but worried the future would go into some recycling machine.

In fact, I remember distinctly saying this when the field was getting settled for the 2016 race: “Anybody but another Clinton or another Bush, please. We don’t have royal families in America.”

Well, a decade later there are No Kings marches, and for once this old guy was ahead of his time.

And look, I like Hillary Clinton OK, and think she would have been a good president. She is even smarter than her husband, but was a terrible candidate, and most of America knew that. Her time was 2008, but went onto run one of the stupidest campaigns in American history, and the young up-and-coming candidate with a real message, and the outside lane all to himself blasted past her and into the White House.

Even Obama, for all his talent, was turning into an establishment Democrat toward the end of his term, and was convinced that it was important to keep the club together. If it wasn't Hillary’s time in 2008, it would have to be in 2016, whether he or anybody else liked it or not.

So he gave her a high-profile job as Secretary of State, and that settled things, even if it was unsettling to millions of people in America, who weren’t so sure. The real irony here of course is that the guy who should have had the inside track, Vice President Joe Biden, was tackled by the party establishment, and told to wait his turn.

Biden publicly said the tragic loss of his son, Beau, in 2015 led to his decision not to run, but it was clear the decision was not his to make. Hillary was the nominee.

I’ll go to my grave believing Biden would have won in 2016, not because he was smarter than Clinton, but because America is plenty misogynistic enough to have ensured that.

Once again Hillary was stuck running in the middle lane, while the Republicans grudgingly gave way to a maniac who was connecting with white Americans, who were bruised from all the good Obama did.

Because the irony runs deep today, it was none other than Bill Clinton who might have given the best explanation for his wife’s defeat when he said in 2012: “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.”

Democrats desperately need a new club, but mostly a new message and coalition, which brings us full circle back to Platner in Maine.

I guarantee you 90 percent of the Democratic Party establishment, their elitist bosses, and the mob on social media who were calling for his head never heard him speak. The man has a gift, just as Bill Clinton did when he burst on the scene in Arkansas 40-plus years ago. And think of that: A Democratic governor in Arkansas.

Nothing lasts forever in America, and I type that with hope today.

Platner understands Maine, just as Clinton understood Arkansas. These men knew what the electorate wanted and didn't want, and how to address it. Like so many in this country, Mainers are sick and tired of the head-in-the-sand, do-nothing establishment, who are so ineffective at communicating to the American public that they can’t even preach patience anymore.

The problem isn’t that a guy like Platner was running in Maine, the problem is that a guy like Chuck Schumer is running the Democratic Senate.

Platner for all his warts was offering change and solutions, while Schumer is offering nothing but we’ve been getting for the better part of three decades, which has helped lead to the greatest divergence in income in American history.

Too few people have too damn much in America, and I swear to God, if we don’t get a hold of this pronto, we are done.

OVER.

This is the biggest issue facing America, and second isn't close.

These billionaires don’t care whether you can afford to eat or not. They don’t care how much you are paying for health insurance. They don’t care about clean air and drinking water. They don’t care if the current president is the biggest lowlife in American history, and the most dangerous man on Earth …

Like that lowlife, they care only about themselves and accruing as much wealth as possible, and anybody who dares speak out about this will be crushed. And if you have a problem with that you can take it to their bought-off Court.

For all of our problems in this boiling country, most Americans can actually see this. The candidates who also see this, and can speak to them will thrive. The candidates that want to tell us the answers lie somewhere in the mucky middle are sentencing us to more of the same, and again I am telling you we won’t survive that.

Plater was onto something, and whether you want to say the messenger was shot or that he shot himself, nobody in the Democratic Establishment can say they didn’t hear his message.

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(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)

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