1128: Graham Platner Isn't Backing Down

23:22Graham Platner:And, and I think, you know, the reason my, this campaign has sort of blown up the way it has is I think a lot of people are getting wise to this. I think a lot of folks are like, wait a second, like this stuff that we all thought for years, we are getting a totally different outcome from what we claim we're trying to do. So are we actually trying to do the thing that we claim, or is all of this doing something else? And when you reframe the question of like, does all of this exist just to like screw working people and make somebody else rich suddenly a lot of decisions we make begins to become a lot more clear yeah and so i that's kind of where i've it's been a long journey i mean it's definitely not been i didn't like have a day where i'm like oh that's i figured it out but well and obviously so obviously you're like

24:09Jon Favreau:shaped by your experiences in iraq you come home all the everything you just said you know you could You could have found out by just being on the internet, right? And reading about politics and reading the news. But you decided long before you ran for Senate to get involved in community organizing, which I find really interesting. What got you into that? What did you want to change in your community specifically? And what did you find about the work? What was challenging? What was fulfilling?

24:36Graham Platner:like a number i forget what year this was but i read a book called no shortcuts by jane mccalevey and she is a pretty storied labor organizer who sadly passed just a few years ago which is a shame because we could use her now in it the the book really talks about the difference between organizing and mobilizing developing a deeper theory of power in which power really is accessible for people who are willing to organize and to take it in many ways, uh, in that we, in our society, even in like liberal circles still kind of have this vision that there is an elite who's like worthy of wielding power.

25:14Graham Platner:And the rest of us kind of have to like, you know, let them do it. Uh, and her argument is like, that's simply not true. That really power is power is for everybody, but it requires organizing to bring it around. It requires trust building and relationship building. And I read that and it kind of changed my life actually, because I began to think that, like I spent a lot of time, especially coming back. My last trip to Afghanistan was in 2018 and it was just, to call it disillusioning would be an understatement. I was there for six months, hadn't been there in seven years. And I was like, okay, well, nobody has any new ideas.

25:56Graham Platner:This is insane. And I came back and I was really kind of just at a loss of what to do. And I decided to kind of opt out. And I moved back to my hometown, became an oyster farmer, started working on the ocean and really wanted to just check out. But while I did that, I also began to connect with my community. I live in a town of a thousand people. It's a town I was born and raised in. I wound up on the planning board. I wound up being the harbor master. And in doing all that, I began to see like really the value of building trust and relationships and just organizing on the ground. And I also began to realize that organizing is actually not that complicated.

26:38Graham Platner:It's just really hard and that there is no graduate version of it. It's all one-on-one stuff.

26:45Jon Favreau:And it's hard because it is difficult to get people to participate, to care, to sort of break down barriers.

26:51Graham Platner:Well, and because you have to put a lot of time, unpaid labor into it. You have to believe.

26:56Jon Favreau:Yeah.

26:57Graham Platner:And you have to go out into your community and you have to tell people what you believe, which is also hard. And it requires you to kind of open yourself up to a lot of people who like, right? Like people who I know, who you have to like, kind of say like, this is what I believe. And sometimes people are like, I'm not into that. And they're like, you're my neighbor. That bums me out. Um, but you have to do it. And we had a number of issues in, uh, in Eastern Maine. Uh, for instance, there was a school board race and out of, uh, frankly, an out of state pack came in with a bunch of money and, uh, uh, backed a, uh, a very anti-trans, uh, candidate and somebody who'd been on the board for 13 years, who was well-respected in the community, who everybody liked lost a seat And a month later, the school district pulled back protections for LGBTQ kids that had been there for six years for no reason.

27:58Graham Platner:Outside packaging involved in a local school board race in Sullivan. Yeah. Technically, yeah, in Franklin. But yeah, we have an RSU, so a regional school. And it was this moment for myself and a few other people where we watched this happen and it only happened because it was no organizing versus a little bit of organizing. They had people to knock doors and this guy had himself. It's a small town school board race. And there was no apparatus to support him. There was no way of like getting people to knock doors for him. he was calling around almost like frantic understanding what was happening like with a week until the election and there really wasn't anything that existed and so a number of us we'd already been we'd already formed like kind of a small community organizing group but we use this as kind of an example of we understood that if we don't have people who can make signs and put them up if we don't have people who can knock doors who can make phone calls in their communities talking to their neighbors people that they trust or people who would trust them if we don't build that then we're going to lose this kind of fight and so we just started to build it and we reached out to folks and we got a number of the other larger statewide groups we reached out to local democratic committee we reached out to frankings a lot of individuals who we knew kind of had who are worked up about this because every like a ton of people are angry but again there was no mechanism and we kind of we realized that especially right now after trump's re-election people want to do something they want to fight yeah they want to get involved the problem is in a lot of places there is no there's no room to go into there's no place and we figured we just have to build the room and once you build the room people come into it and they start talking to each other and they start building relationships and i mean the way we did it was pretty non-hierarchical so essentially like folks would get together and be like this is the thing i care about so he's like i care about that too and like go forth and make that a campaign and uh and it's and it worked it like we we actually wound up like winning the next school board race and like we and we're still like kind of now we're trying to get candidates to run for county commissioner stuff like that so there is a to me that was a direct it was a moment where i realized oh man, this kind of power building is very real.

30:25Graham Platner:It just requires people to really get out of their comfort zone and start building relationships again. And for me, it was the foundation of when the campaign started. One of the reasons I agreed to do this was purely to use it as a statewide organizing vehicle. With the visibility and the resources that we're going to get, we can take that kind of strategy those kind of tactics that kind of on the ground trust building that we do and we can supercharge it and we can get the labor unions involved and we can get all the other community organizations around the state involved and then we can bring in all these people who engage with politics via electoral campaigns and we can train them how to be organizers and activists in their community and i think that's that's how you build the apparatus to knock on enough doors, talk to enough people and build enough trust where, I mean, I'm pretty, I'm convinced we're not just going to beat Susan Collins in November.

31:28Graham Platner:I think we're going to trounce Susan Collins. And if the worst thing happens and we have an election that is contested or called into question, well, we still have an apparatus to turn people out, to actually have people mobilize. And if we have to, you know, resist fascism in the streets with a mass movement, which is really the only way you can. And we're trying to build the apparatus to do both. And when we're done, we want it to stay. I don't want any of this to die because one single Senate seat's not going to get us universal healthcare. So we're going to need to have the power of people still on our side in order to like get the wins we're going to need down the road.

32:09Jon Favreau:I'm a nerd. So I looked up the election results in Sullivan for the last decade, quite a bellwether. Barely goes for Trump in 2016 by like less than 1%, although as you said, it's like a thousand people. Jared Golden barely wins in 18, barely flips to Biden in 20. Trump squeaks out a win in 2024. I'm sure you know most of the people there. What are their politics like? What do people believe there? It's a, I mean, everybody works really hard. Eastern Maine is economically depressed.

32:39Graham Platner:um we have it's most it's commercial fishing uh it is a lot of construction um mostly because we have some pretty substantial summer communities nearby which brings money in and then across the bay from us we have acadia national park so there's a lot of folks that work in industries that are related to tourism um so it's a very it's a very working class area which i frankly is I think why it is this kind of weird back and forth between like Trumpism and not Trumpism. Because, I mean, Trump, I have a lot of friends who voted for Donald Trump three times. And they hate billionaires. They think corporate tech folks are like manipulating all of us.

33:27Graham Platner:They think that corporate owned agriculture and food systems are exploiting all of us and essentially poisoning us. they think that hedge funds and private equity are like destroying working people's lives i agree with all of this one of the reasons they voted for trump is because trump came along and he told them the one thing that they knew was true was true which is that they live in a system that is not built for them and somebody somewhere is robbing them blind and once he said that And they were willing to kind of forgive all the other stuff because that's the core thing that people understand, that we live in a political and economic system that does not have their best interests at heart.

34:10Graham Platner:When you tell people that something they know in their bones is real, they're willing to kind of go along with a lot more, I think, afterwards. And one of the biggest problems we as Democrats have had is that we didn't have a counter to that. We told folks that we had to protect the status quo. We told folks that no the economic system is actually doing great Did you guys not see that the Wall Street's doing fine? GDP looks great unemployment is record lows Yeah, but everybody works three jobs and they hate them So it doesn't matter if unemployment's low working people are working themselves to the bone I think that that's why and that's I'm utterly convinced that economic populism going after the oligarchy, that is how we kind of rebuild trust with working people.

34:58Graham Platner:And I mean, I say this, this is not like a radical idea. I mean, honestly, it seems pretty obvious, but the democratic party, at least elements of it, certainly in DC have, have really walked away from that. And I think working people walked away from them because of it.

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36:47Jon Favreau:so i want to talk about that a little more like what do you think happened because hancock county where sullivan is um went for obama by 17 points 2012 and you know obviously i've you know i've heard you say and i i get it that the democratic party has become too tied to corporate interests like where specifically has the party gone wrong in the last decade in terms of policies decisions positions are there things you can point to where you're like that's what yeah i mean i absolutely to the financial crisis bailing out the banks bailing out the big

37:25Graham Platner:industries letting people walk away with gold or jump away with golden parachutes while those banks still turned around and foreclosed on people's homes while the average working person saw their, frankly, their retirement savings just disappear. And then we watched the political apparatus back up the people that broke the thing in the first place. I think that was huge. That broke a lot of trust. And then further on, you know, like the...

37:55Jon Favreau:So I was in, you know, I was there. I was in the White House. We sort of knew that this was going to happen we walk into the white house um bush had already done the the bailout yep and we can't really undo it at that point because we can't let the banks fail because the whole system goes under and we make sure that the banks pay all the money back with interest right the fucking executives get away with the golden parachutes and i remember like trying to remember talking to larry summers about it and i was like he's like we it's contract law we can't claw back the bonuses like it's illegal we're not we're gonna get fought and i'm like okay we can talk about contract law but there's like people with pitchforks outside the white house right um so like you know we're same thing with like why didn't anyone go to jail well the laws aren't there the doj right doj won't prosecute because the laws aren't there and obviously we can't direct the doj to do anything anyway obama gives an interview where he calls these people fat cats he gets in trouble for calling them fat cats right let alone all the policies yeah i think looking back there's plenty of criticism over our housing policy though even then at the time i remember them being like well we'd love to bail out people who like lost their homes in this but what about we don't want to bail out the people who bought second and third homes that they knew they couldn't afford because then we're rewarding people who acted irresponsibly so there was all this we passed the recovery act we passed the affordable care act we spend a whole bunch of money that then we lose the midterms over spending that much money and i only bring this up not to not to defend any of it because i often look back on it and think like we're gonna have another crisis and another crisis and you get republicans who are like we'll let the whole fucking thing fail and we don't care and then we'll just blame the immigrants that's right and then you get the democrats being like okay we're gonna try our best to solve the problem and it's not gonna be good enough and then everyone's gonna hate us and say that we are uh tied to corporate interests yeah you know it's like it's a hard

39:50Graham Platner:Totally. But I also think that that's why I'll just be entirely up front. I mean, I think that's why we need to kind of change the political will of the Democratic Party to go a little bit further to actually go after. I mean, people should have gone to prison. I mean, Iceland put people in prison. And I understand that. Yeah, I mean, but Trump administration is happy to abuse the Justice Department. and send them after folks. They send them after like Comey because he hurt Trump's feelings. I honestly don't think the American people would be angry if the Justice Department went after folks that like destroyed their retirement savings or kicked their neighbors out of their homes.

40:32Graham Platner:It's a, and that's the problem. Even before that, like, I mean, I assume,

40:39Jon Favreau:yeah, maybe they wouldn't be upset. I assume we want to make sure the Justice Department only goes after people who actually broke the law. Who actually broke the law, of course. But then the question is like, yeah but also we need to pass the fucking laws well that's but that's the other thing so i mean

40:49Graham Platner:but that's the other like we need people in the senate in the house who want to pass these laws and also frankly put enforcement mechanisms in place yes i mean that's one of our biggest problems right now we've got lots of laws but then they get broken i mean the trump administration breaks the law every day and then a lot of people just stand around like well what do we do like what's the, what's the mechanism to actually enforce this stuff? And, you know, and again, like I'm not, I don't, I don't think that the criticism is always correct, but the criticism is absolutely there and it's driven like the kind of narrative.

41:22Graham Platner:And that's why I honestly, that's why I think that the only way to regain the trust of the American people as Democrats is to be radically different than what we've had to really become like, there should be no such thing as a labor Democrat. at. That should just be being in the democratic party there. We do need to cut ties with the, I would say the larger, uh, the donor world that comes from the financial system, the donor world that comes from Silicon Valley, like that wants to use AI to either put us all out of work, or I guess maybe kill us all as of, uh, it's very insane. Um, we need to cut ties with that.

42:05Graham Platner:And I think we need to do it in a very clear public manner. Until we do, I think a lot of folks are still going to see Democrats as beholden to the same corporate apparatus that the Republicans are. The problem is that the Republicans have the weapon of just blaming marginalized communities, blaming immigrants. We need to blame the oligarchy. We need to blame the corporate power that resulted in the deregulation of the banking system. I mean, that's a big one. We used to have laws in place. There's a reason 2008 happened in 2008 and not 1994. I mean, we changed rules. And frankly, a lot of Democrats supported that stuff.

42:51Graham Platner:And until we become a party that doesn't do that, until we become the party that uses the tax code to go after the money that, in my opinion, has actually been stolen from working people in this country over the past four decades, until we use, frankly, like the anti-monopoly laws we already have on the books. We just have to stop having Robert Bork's wild reading of what a monopoly is. Until we do that, I think people aren't going to trust us.

43:18Jon Favreau:I guess a big question I've had for much of the last decade is, like, can Democrats win over people who have more culturally conservative beliefs with economic populism alone? Because I very much want to believe that the answer is yes. I have not seen the evidence that it can. And I realize the sample size is small, but like, you know, Bernie Sanders runs in 2016. Bernie Sanders runs in 2020. Gets a hell of a lot of votes, still getting big crowds, did not win either race, obviously. Yeah. My friend Sherrod Brown. Yeah. Who is, you know, a perfect example of an economically populist Democrat who still holds, you know, liberal views on other issues, has not sort of tacked to the middle on any cultural views.

44:04Jon Favreau:You know, held out in Ohio for a while and then just lost his last race and hopefully he wins again this year as well. Oh, fingers crossed. But what do you think about that? I think that it's – one, I think the landscape has changed now.

44:17Graham Platner:I do fundamentally think that a lot of people, even who hold culturally conservative views, are realizing that they are in fact getting taken for a ride on the economic side. I think it's more clear now that it has been. um also this can be a little but the epstein files also are showing people of all political stripes that there is in fact a class of people who lives above accountability and lives above and kind of sees the rest of us as like a like this sort of amorphous blob to either just extract wealth out of so they can go live depraved lifestyles i think that's actually really helpful uh one because it's you know people are realizing that it's true yeah but in my experience in Maine thus far, I have a lot of people come up to me at events and in public who identify as Republicans, identify as conservatives, tell me straight up that they do not agree with some of the things I say, but that they think the fact that I'm fighting back against the establishment and the system, that that's more important and that's why they're going to vote for me.

45:21Graham Platner:And it's anecdotal, but it also pans out in the polling. I mean, we do really well with independence for a long time. The whole story was, is that independence are this like magic, moderate middle. And that if you have any kind of sort of, you know, populist or progressive, as we define it, views that you'll never appeal to those folks. Well, it turns out when you just go out there and talk about the fact that billionaires are robbing you, a lot of folks are like, yeah, that's what I'm here for. That's the, and so it's, so I think the landscape has somewhat changed but like you know with sherrod brown sherrod was a victim of the larger failure of the democratic party he was not a victim of his own politics i think you know ohio went from being a blue stronghold of unions to becoming this red stronghold of disenfranchised angry working class people who 30 years ago were democrats yeah because they were all in labor unions and then i mean it's not like in the 1990s it's not like the clinton administration really stood up for labor right you know it's it's we we the democratic party has a lot of a role to play in the diminishment of labor power in the free trade projects like nafta that really did in the end screw a lot of working americans yeah you know i think that that when you put it into the greater context.

46:42Graham Platner:I think that's what's happened. And in this moment, frankly, just because of the material reality that people are living in, it is becoming very clear to a lot of folks, whether they're conservative or liberal or whatever you want, or just in the middle and don't even care about politics, there's becoming a very clear awareness that they are, in fact, being taken for a ride by people with immense amounts of power and that those who are willing to stand up to that power, those are the people they're going to look to and support. And I think they're willing to sort of not care actually about a lot of the culture war stuff, which in my opinion, and I say this often, I think was all invented to keep us all from having the conversation about taxing billionaire wealth and breaking up corporate monopolies.

47:35Graham Platner:I think that's why we have to argue about all these culture war issues that in reality i mean it keeps us all divided but it doesn't reopen the hospital and it doesn't change the fact that your rent continues to go up or that your uh that the wages that you've been earning continue to stagnate while the prices of goods and services continue to rise all the culture war stuff there's nothing for that and we need to be very clear and cogent and blunt about how we're going to change it. And I think if we do that, I do think that there is an opening to do this. Do you think the Democrats have, I don't want to say taken the bait,

48:18Jon Favreau:but engaged too much in some of these culture wars?

48:21Graham Platner:Totally. And I think they have taken the bait. And I'll be entirely honest, I think some of them, some of them don't even take the bait. Some of them rise to it on purpose because they don't want to have the other conversation. I mean, there is an element, I see this all the time, of, you know, more kind of establishment folks who are like, look, I don't want to talk about this, but they make me talk about it. And now I'm going to talk about how I don't want to talk about it for the next four hours, and I'll never talk about raising taxes on billionaires. And I think there's an element within the party that actually likes this stuff because it gives them this ability to pretend they hate this, but it sucks up all the oxygen.

49:01Graham Platner:So then you never have to get around to the structural or systemic reforms that we have to make.

49:05Jon Favreau:Sometimes I wonder if it's because the coalition of the Democratic Party is now more college educated and upper income than it's ever been. Yeah. That like what gets people angry and what gets people like eager to participate in politics are some of these issues, which, you know, and I will say like I'm sure people feel strongly. I feel strongly about a lot of progressive cultural issues.

49:28Graham Platner:And I am like I do not back away from things. Right. I think all the wins we've made for justice and equality, we take no steps back from any of this stuff.

49:35Jon Favreau:But I'm also very aware as someone who like now has money that you're like, oh, when your life is like comfortable. Right. Then you can say that like, yes, it's important that people care about raising taxes and people care about health care. But also, are you going to be as angry about it as everyone else? And I think that like I am because I am very politically engaged. But I think for a lot of people who just show up at elections, who are like more suburban, upper income, stuff like that, who have been voting Democrat for a long time. I wonder if it's like the driving force for them.

50:04Graham Platner:It might be, but we're not winning with that. Right. I mean, there's that great Chuck Schumer line. Yeah, I know. For everyone we lose. For every working class person we lose out in the countryside, we're going to gain two voters in the suburbs. Suburb, yeah. And it didn't happen. Yeah. Donald Trump won.

50:27Jon Favreau:Yeah.

50:27Graham Platner:And then he won again. And we lost a lot of seats around the country. like so clearly that math did not pan out i i truly think that the only way forward for us as a party is to really become the a real party of working people again and you know when you do that it doesn't mean you're like also not i mean look when i talk about working people i literally mean anybody that just makes money from wages yeah which is everybody yeah i mean i'll just be like i've had a bunch of folks be like well what about the middle class i'm like yeah man in this america The middle class is the working class. Quite frankly, somebody that started a business and has just worked their asses off every day ever since and might now have like a bunch of money but still works, they're way closer to someone working three jobs in poverty than they are to a billionaire.

51:20Graham Platner:Like we're all kind of down here. And when we talk about policies, about clawing a lot of that wealth back, we're not talking about going after small business owners. We're not talking about going after big business owners. We're talking about going after the people who used their wealth and power to change policies in the political system to then consolidate more wealth and power. They cheated. And we need to use political power to claw that stuff back. So I think that by becoming the party of representing working folks, we really would be becoming the party of like really representing the vast majority of Americans.

51:57Graham Platner:And as people begin to realize that this right-wing populism, it's not making things cheaper. And it's not reopening hospitals. And it's not making your health insurance company any less awful to deal with. That realization will kick in. And we won't get everybody. But I think we will start getting folks back. But we need to be there with open arms. And we need to be there with policies that are very understandable. I mean, I think that's a big one.

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53:46Jon Favreau:Well, I want to talk about Medicare for all because I know that's like central to your campaign. And I now feel like I have talked about healthcare for most of my life in politics and went through this in the 2020 campaign, obviously had been there for ACA as well. So I dealt with a lot of healthcare politics. I think insurance companies are horrible. I think that the for profit system is insane. And I think it is a no brainer that if we were starting from scratch, that we would have a single payer system or some version of a single payer system. I think that the figuring out how to win the political support to transition from what we have now to a single payer system, Medicare for all or something like it is a political challenge that is made more difficult in large part by all the money that the insurance companies and everyone else has.

54:36Jon Favreau:But there are also some like real trade-offs and transitions that I think average people who very much dislike their insurance companies are still concerned about. And, you know, like they tried, they put it on the ballot in Colorado in 2016 as a ballot initiative. Medicare for All fails. Oregon fails. California fails. They pass it in Vermont, the only state that's tried. And then they failed at implementation, right?

55:00Graham Platner:Well, one is because it needs to be a national policy. Yes. I mean, like, especially small rural states, we don't have the money. Right. I mean, in many ways, we're talking about building a national risk pool. And the more people you have in a risk pool, the more effective your insurance is, which really is what we're talking about here. I'll just use my own experience. So I essentially get universal healthcare. I'm a disabled combat vet. And because of that, I simply get free point of service care. It allowed me to start a small business. It allowed me to take some time to figure out what kind of life I wanted to live after my combat service.

55:42Graham Platner:without it i would not have ever been able to be an oyster farmer because i would have had to work another job to have health care it gave me a real material freedom that allowed me to build something that today is a successful small business that employs people in eastern maine never would have existed without my health care that basic element of foundational support just around healthcare is what allowed me to become a successful small business owner. Not only do I think that providing that is going to unleash a lot of productivity in the real world, because this is important. We have a system and we have a lot of metrics that we use to judge our productivity that frankly mostly seems to be fantastical in the financialized system.

56:29Graham Platner:But in the real world where people actually build things and exchange them with each other for money, that in that world, I honestly do think that giving people just this simple foundational support is going to unleash a lot more productivity. People have the freedom to start small businesses or to engage in art, to engage in things that I think actually elevate all of us as a society. Also, we would take healthcare off the plate of small business owners, which it's a nightmare. A lot of small business, medium-sized business owners, They want to provide health care to their employees. But, I mean, I've spoken to folks in Maine who are like, if you have a company 50 employees and up, one of those employees' job is to just deal with the health insurance stuff, paying the premiums, dealing with the companies.

57:18Graham Platner:It's a frig. You take that off their plates, well, now they can just focus on what their business is, not also having to be this intermediary around health care. I know that we can do it because the VA does it. Right? That program exists. The VA only has problems when Republicans cut its budget. When we fund it and we resource it, it does a spectacular job. In Maine, the VA is awesome. And it's awesome because we have a small population and the resources and employees, the ratio for the population it's serving, it's a good ratio. So it works. I've lived in other parts of the country where the VA system is really hard to deal with because they don't get the funding.

58:01Graham Platner:and therefore the outcome. It's almost as though you get what you pay for, whoever would have guessed.

58:09When I think about moments in American history

58:15Graham Platner:where we had to address systemic problems, big ones, there are always going to be times of experimentation and frankly growing pains. And the only way it ever works is when you have people in positions of power who have the political will to try to drive it forward. I mean, this is what the New Deal was. The New Deal was FDR having built a broad coalition, having political power, and then really just ramming things through, making them happen. Some of them failed, and then they changed. They were imaginative. They experimented. Things worked. Things didn't work. I mean, the NRA worked for a little while and then it kind of didn't.

59:02Graham Platner:And so they got rid of it. And there is a – when we electrified all of rural America, it was done with an array of options, whether it was public ownership or public-private partnerships and sometimes just straight-up private companies. But we used to use our imaginations to fix problems. And I think our biggest problem recently has been we have a political class that has sort of forgotten how to dream big. Everything's a tax credit. Everything's a block grant. Everything's like something weird. And when you try to explain it to people, like you lose them in like five seconds because everyone's like, I don't even, what is this weird wonky language you're using?

59:41Graham Platner:Yeah. Which, I mean, it's one of my biggest, biggest criticisms of the Biden administration where they did a lot of amazing things and then just never told anybody about them. Yeah. And then we all stood around being like, they were like, why did nobody like that we did this? I'm like, dude, nobody knew. and when you did explain it it was always in this kind of very complicated legal language yeah then nobody engages with that when it comes to health care i mean i'll be honest i think we have to do a lot of big things i i'm we're going to need federal money to reopen hospitals yeah i think we need to start thinking about mental health care as being as much a part of health care as everything else and incorporating that into a larger system i mean we in rural maine healthcare is collapsing now, not next year, not down the road.

1:00:29Graham Platner:It's already happened. I know.

1:00:31Jon Favreau:I was going to say like one of the big problems or one of the big challenges with Medicare for all is that hospitals get a, are open right now because they get reimbursed through. And if you suddenly have every hospital go to the Medicare reimbursement rate, suddenly hospitals are closing all over the place. I mean, I think this is why Bernie and his plan has like a transition period It's a four-year transition period. Four-year transition period.

1:00:53Graham Platner:And also, I mean, to be fair, I've read Bernie's full bill, and it's essentially universal healthcare with the name Medicare for All. As you really kind of get through it, I mean, it covers dental. It covers vision. Medicare doesn't cover those things. It's an expanded program that really is just a single-payer universal healthcare system that is based around basic things. like you can still get insurance it for like for higher level procedures that it doesn't cover but it does cover all the stuff like if you get sick or if you get injured and you just don't have to like think about it and i gotta say having traveled a lot and been to a lot of other countries i just have this element of me where i'm like dude everybody else does it differently They all figured it out.

1:01:42Graham Platner:And yeah, of course, it's never perfect. These systems will always have, I mean, we're talking about large bureaucratic systems. They're going to have some problems. They have a lot more problems when you get neoliberal policies in place that start taking money away from them. But everybody else has a better version of this and it's cheaper. And the care in many ways is better for most people. I mean, a lot of folks are always, well, in America, you know, like the rich come here to get great procedures. I'm like, that does no good for somebody with no money. Right. Like, or who can't afford, who can't even afford ACA coverage now because premiums have gone up by like triple fold.

1:02:22Graham Platner:Yep. And, I mean, these are people I know. These are my neighbors. I mean, a relative of mine had to drop her health insurance because her premium doubled because of the loss of the ACA extensions.

1:02:36Jon Favreau:and even that it's like we're just even if we keep expanding the subsidies and the credits for the ACA what it keeps going you're just like they're raising prices and we're all just subsidizing the higher like at some point you have to figure out how to contain the cost of the health care

1:02:49Graham Platner:yeah and and I'll just be entirely entirely up front as long as there is a substantial profit motive with a substantial middleman we're just gonna like unless we address that part of the problem. Subsidies won't be enough because somebody is going to figure out how to pull more money out of the thing. Costs will go up. So I think it's, I do not pretend that it will not be a transition period. I mean, we're going to, it would be one of the largest projects we've really ever undertaken as a nation to transition from the healthcare system we have to a single payer universal healthcare system. But we also have to do it because what we're doing now is insanely expensive and it's terrible.

1:03:33Graham Platner:It's, and it's in many places in rural America, it's totally unsustainable. It's absolutely falling apart.

1:03:40Jon Favreau:I want to ask you about this because it's in the news. And by the time people hear this, Trump could have already launched a war with Iran. I did want to get your response to what a white house source told Politico about selling the war quote. There's thinking in the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us and give us more reason to take action. Thoughts?

1:04:03Graham Platner:I hate everything so much.

1:04:08I mean, one, I think it's disgusting that we've got people in the White House who are literally

1:04:15Graham Platner:sitting around thinking about how do we sell a war? I mean, we went through the run-up to the war in Iraq. At least then the Bush administration had the decency to really try to trick us. Yeah. At least they like, they really went out of their way. They, they, they made Colin Powell sully his, his entire reputation at the UN. They like really, they put the work in and it's so, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's insulting to have these folks who are just like, like, oh, we're going to figure out a war in a week. Like we're just, oh man, this Epstein stuff's getting out of control. Iran, we're going to invade Iran now.

1:04:56Graham Platner:We trade the Venezuela thing. Like we did that now we're, we're still screwing around down there. We need to start another one. Let's just go to war with Iran. And, and I mean, that's what they're doing. All this is, is, is posturing. And as somebody who fought a war too, it's, it's disgusting. uh and it also is i think for me i mean one of the reasons i want to go to the senate specifically is we need a senate who's really going to take their power back yeah when it comes to war making

1:05:32Jon Favreau:i mean the constitution is pretty clear yeah i saw that the war that they're the democrats think that the war powers resolution will now get a vote in the house yep um i don't know if it'll

1:05:42Graham Platner:pass because i think there's a few democrats who i mean this this dude this is i mean this is and by the way you want to talk about like one of those reasons why working people or regular people don't it's also because of this stuff because there is this connection like we just should be the anti-war party i mean the fact that there is an element of the right that this kind of isolationist version of it that actually gets to almost take on the mantle of being that only works when we have elements of the democratic party that are like willing to go along with this stuff we shouldn't be fighting wars i'm sorry we should not be sending young american men and women off to kill a bunch of people in foreign countries i mean for essentially any reason i like i'm it is hard for me to see any intervention post-world war ii that in the long run really worked out well korea maybe you could make the argument everything else though and it is a like i'm not i'm not a pacifist but at this point i've become essentially anti-war when it when it comes to like the nation writ large and how we use our power internationally because every time we do this when you when you go back and look at it in hindsight it's pretty much always a bad idea but more importantly for me like there's a human cost to this stuff that you've seen yeah that you felt like i know what i know what it looks like when american made high explosive interacts with children like i've touched it it it's a it's a horrifying thing you know i i know what it feels like to have friends die and to have a lot of other friends of mine and myself included have to deal with the trauma of that for years afterwards words it we need more people in positions of power frankly who either understand it because they've experienced it or who are just kind of ideologically opposed and don't want us to do this kind of stuff and it's and it's not just about like the moral component it's about the fact that like this stuff it doesn't make us safer it doesn't make the world safer it tends to to quote a famous Marine who came long before me, war is a racket.

1:08:06Graham Platner:And there are people that make an immense amount of money off of it. And when you go look at a lot of the wars we fought, frankly, certainly in my lifetime, at the end of the day, that's usually what happens. And I do not see a war with Iran falling into a different category. In fact, it seems to be almost like, i mean i said this about venezuela as well it's like iraq but dumber yeah but we need people in places of political power who are really willing to call it exactly for what it is and to stand up against it i mean this can't happen yeah um last question hopefully a lighter

1:08:41Jon Favreau:note you recently took a campaign hiatus to travel to norway with your wife yes uh to try ivf speaking of health care in the yeah exactly in the hopes of having your first child uh can you talk to me about that decision and why Norway?

1:08:53Graham Platner:Yeah. So we've been, uh, Amy and I have been dealing with infertility for about two and a half years now. Um, and went through all the previous steps, eventually got to the point where like, all right, IVF is the last thing. And, uh, because of, I mean, the VA doesn't cover it if it's not like clearly my problem and Amy's not a vet, so it doesn't cover her. It's kind of weird, which needs to be changed, by the way, because to have children, you do need both people, but whatever, it's a whole other thing. Um, I'm going to work on that when I get to the Senate, uh, we, uh, her insurance didn't cover it.

1:09:31Graham Platner:Um, the VA stuff didn't cover it. And so we started to look into doing it in the United States and it, the cost is astronomical. And in new England, there's only one clinic. So we, and their only clinic is in Portland, Maine, which is three hours away from where we live. so we'd have to be traveling anyways. We started to look into it. We saw how expensive it was, but we really weren't sure what else to do. And then a friend of Amy's had either a relative or someone who had gone to Norway. And they're like, you know, in Norway, it's really cheap, and everybody's really nice, and it's a wonderful personal experience.

1:10:08Graham Platner:And so Amy reached out to a clinic in Norway, like on a Monday. And we had like an hour long intake exam with the surgeon on Thursday. And the moment I knew we were going to go is at the end of an hour long intake exam. I was like, okay, how much do we owe you guys? And they were like, why would you give us money? Like nothing has happened. And I'm like, yeah, we're definitely, we're going to Norway. I mean, this is, uh, it was amazing. And it was amazing. It was a, and in the end, even with the travel, staying in an Airbnb for two weeks, the plane tickets. It was one quarter the cost of just the baseline of doing it here in the United States.

1:10:56Graham Platner:It's insane. And you get treated like a human being. Like the clinic is small. Everybody's really nice to you. They don't look at you as like just something to pull more money out of. They like treat you like a human being, which is you're going through infertility. Yeah. That's very helpful because it's an emotional experience and and you know we developed like a really nice relationship uh with those folks and so it yeah it was a very i mean we're still in it we're still kind of going through the process um but it's been we actually i mean i talk about this we joke about it that even if it cost the same we still would have done the norwegian version because like it's just it's so it's so much more pleasant it's pleasant and i mean you go to like norwegian hospitals where you know And literally no one is sitting there worried about how much this costs.

1:11:40Jon Favreau:They've really figured it out in those Nordic countries. We shouldn't invade Denmark. They're pretty nice. We should not invade Denmark.

1:11:46Graham Platner:No war with Greenland. Yes, that's good. On top of all the other ones. I feel like that one might be the most. I think we can get that done. We should definitely not do that one.

1:11:55Jon Favreau:Well, good luck on your journey there. And also good luck on the campaign. And thank you for coming by.

1:12:00Graham Platner:Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

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