Graham Platner and the Rise of the ‘Dirtbag’ Democrat

21:10Michelle Cottle:You know, I kind of had the opposite instinct that actually that the vice that you're seeing in politicians is an appeal precisely because it demonstrates that they are fanatical. That in other words, they are not restrained by the norms and the rules. And in a moment of extreme negative polarization, in a time when there is an enormous amount of raw hatred, the presence of this vice says and broadcast to partisan voters, I have no walls. I have no rules. And you can see this sort of mirrored in the talk around Plattner, because you keep hearing, I want a fighter. I want a fighter. And I think if Tallarico loses, and let's be clear, I mean, the odds are against him.

21:56Michelle Cottle:I think there's a lot of sort of this burst of optimism. But the reminder is that Texas is the Lucy with the football for Democrats, and it has been for some time. He's got an enormous sort of structural deficit to overcome. Not to say that he can't do it, but it's a tough race. But I guarantee you, if he loses, if he loses, one of the knocks against him will be, well, he wasn't a fighter. Well, what do they mean by that? I guarantee you that Tallarico will campaign his heart out, that his staff will exert themselves to the limit of their endurance to try to win this race. But he will not be a fighter because he's not cruel.

22:37Michelle Cottle:He's not belligerent. He is leading and leaning into the race in a way that is trying to emphasize sort of, even if you disagree with me, I'm going to treat you with decency. And that is not fighting right now. That's not fighting. And that's why I think that the Plattner situation is dangerous. Obviously, he's not Donald Trump. I mean— No one is. He is the gateway drug to Trumpism. Because if he wins, let's put it this way, if he wins and Tallarico loses, the cry across the land in that Democratic consultant class will be, find me more Plattners. We need more Plattners. These are the guys who know how to win.

23:20Michelle Cottle:And where have I heard this before? Where have I heard this before? And so I do think that we're at this really interesting moment where, in my question, and I do think we're in this thermostatic reaction against Trump, but it's not clear to me yet the exact nature of it. Is the thermostatic reaction against Trump and for decency? or is the thermostatic reaction against Trump and to pummel and to pummel the other side? And I think that that's gonna be, I don't know how we're going to go. And I think that this, who wins, who loses, who overperforms, who underperforms in the midterms is gonna be an indicator of all of this.

24:05The extent to which how Plattern and Tallarico

24:09Jamelle Bouie:in particular do this year, I do think it's going to shape how Democratic consultants go about doing the recruitment, thinking about the candidates they want to try to find. I know my frustration about any kind of conclusion drawn from electoral performance is that this year, it's clear, as David was suggesting, that the most important factor is just how unpopular Trump is. And so it's almost, I wouldn't say the candidates are immaterial. You can have candidates fit their states, fit their districts. But I'm not sure how many lessons you can draw, but people are going to want to draw the lessons in part because I think Platt in particular, and this is a point I meant to get to earlier, is not just a candidate, but I think he's like a position in like an intra-democratic party factional battle, right?

24:58Jamelle Bouie:It stands with how you view the kinds of people that Democrats tend to recruit to run for office. Should they be, you know, polished with the right credentials, you know, in that sort of thing? Should there be a bit of a looser and more open approach to candidate recruitment? So there are all these things sort of tied up in Plattner that I think don't actually have that much to do with Graham Plattner and have much more to do with these factional battles that are happening, right? have a lot to do with the particular constellation of consultants who are behind Plattner and who are looking for perhaps like a greater say in the direction of Democratic Party strategy.

25:39Jamelle Bouie:And so that's, I mean, to me, that's one of the interesting things about this entire dynamic about, you know, observing the arguments about Plattner online is that everything feels like a proxy fight and not so much dealing with like the particular candidate in the particular race and the particular circumstance.

25:55David French:Yeah, that makes me kind of mental with the overlearning of lessons. So like when Janet Mills suspended her campaign was everybody was like, oh, my God, this proves that, you know, Chuck Schumer was hideous in his recruiting and whatever. I'm sorry. Janet Mills was 78 years old. She would have been the oldest freshman senator ever. That enough was a problem for her beyond whatever kind of issues. But if you look at who else Schumer has recruited, you've got Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Roy Cooper in North Carolina. And Josh Turek just won in Iowa, which was a race that was basically internally heavily about whether or not you supported Chuck Schumer.

26:40David French:So I just not that Chuck is the greatest thing since sliced cheese. Nobody's going to go there. and my position is that it may be time for him to publicly come up with a succession plan. But just the overlearning from one race makes me mental on these things. So just, you know, Maine is not the only show in town. This primary season, we're seeing this whole range of options for new leadership in the party. Jamel, give us your basic take on how the party should be trying to expand its tent. I mean, you can break it down any way you like, but like, are we talking about more moderates? Are we talking about how much should we be paying attention to anti-establishment disruptors, that sort of thing?

27:27Jamelle Bouie:I mean, when you look at the landscape of candidates this cycle, I'm not sure you can draw an actual through line between any of them, right? So or even since since Trump got into office. So obviously last year you had, you know, Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Democrat, Cheryl in New Jersey, who is kind of just like a center left Democrat. Zeran Mamdani identifies with the Democratic Socialists. When you look at Tallarico, he seems to be sort of like a standard Texas liberal in terms of his views. we're not looking at a situation, right, where it's like, oh, look, the moderates are doing so much better than the progressives or the progressives are doing so much better than the moderates.

28:19Jamelle Bouie:A lot of it, again, as I said earlier, shaped by the overall national environment, Trump is very unpopular. And if you seem like a basically capable, reasonable person, voters are going to give you a hearing right now. My sense of when you're thinking about how to fits together a large political coalition, majority coalition. You have to have something that like your party believes in. And it has to be broad enough that it can include a lot of people and specific enough that it's distinctive. So I think the classic example of American political history is the Republican Party in the 1850s, which was anti-slavery.

29:00Jamelle Bouie:That's what it was. There was no particular litmus test centered around this. I think this is kind of the next point. To be anti-slavery in the 1850s could mean that you were an abolitionist. It could mean that you were a free-soiler, meaning that you just didn't want slavery to expand but otherwise didn't really care where it was. It could mean that you didn't even care about that all that much and you didn't like black people all that much. You just didn't like the fact that all of the southern slaveholders controlled the government, right? It meant a lot of different things. and the hat trick of that iteration of the Republican Party is that they were basically sort of like, yeah, sure, okay, whatever it wants to mean to you, it can mean to you.

29:40Jamelle Bouie:But as long as we can agree on this one thing that we're against slavery, we can figure out the details later. And I kind of think that something like that is important. I think Democrats, and I'll say they struggle with this now, have always struggled with this by virtue of the fact that the Democratic Party has always been from its very inception, this kind of stitched together brokerage party of lots of different groups. But I think we're in an age where a political party that will succeed and that can bring people over, that can expand the tent as language goes, is one that can kind of voice some kind of broad principle that, again, that's big enough, that can include a lot of people.

30:26Jamelle Bouie:People can make of it what they want, but still specific enough that it's identifiable, right? That like, if you believe this, then this is the party that you ought to support versus how I think Democrats often go when it comes to trying to appeal to people, which is to say, hey, listen, I'm totally inoffensive. You know, I don't trigger anything you dislike. So you should vote for me.

30:46David French:Oh, don't use that word.

30:47Michelle Cottle:Oh, didn't I use that word? You know, what am I, just coming from looking at it from the outside, I'm struck by something our colleague Ezra Klein said in a podcast not long ago, where I think it was something along the lines of, it's easier to imagine the end of the republic than a Democrat winning a Senate seat in Arkansas. And which is, you know, one of those, as they say, tough but fair assessments. And the question is, when I hear things like, what does the Democratic Party need to do when to win? I, one of my first questions is where? Where? So if you're talking about in Arkansas, where the Democratic Party has been in retreat for a very long time, you have Republican supermajorities, you have extreme difficulty breaking through.

31:37Michelle Cottle:Well, if I'm the Democrats, there's going to be a degree of, say, moderation or ideological malleability that's going to be necessary that would be political suicide if you're running in a Brooklyn congressional district. And there's just going to have to be a comfort with that stitched together coalition. And I think actually one of the problems that emerged for the Democrats is they were starting to move away from that very stitched together coalition towards a much more narrow ideological litmus test. And just as Jamel was saying, the one thing, the one test, if you wanted to be a Republican in 1860, was you had to have at least some degree of discomfort with slavery.

32:26Michelle Cottle:The test in 2024 was far less virtuous. It was, can you put on the red hat? Are you pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine? Doesn't matter. Pro-Ukraine, anti-Ukraine? Doesn't matter. Pro-life, pro-choice? Doesn't matter. can you put on the red hat? And anyone who could put on the red hat was welcome into this constituency. The Democrats could use a bit more of that, I'd have to say, this ability to say, hey, you know, I disagree with you on X or Y or Z. Welcome to the party, my friend, because you agree with me on A, B, C, D, and E.

33:02David French:Oh, yeah, they don't really do that. So I think it's exactly the opposite situation of what Jamel was talking about with the Civil War era Republicans. It is the Democratic Party isn't great for like big shared values that they talk about, but they got a ton of litmus tests. And if you mess up those, you're in a heap of trouble. So by the time the next presidential election rolls around, they are going to need to have a better message about who they are and what they stand for, which, okay, Jamel, we're going to bring this back again to the kind of future vision and leadership. You recently wrote about what a Democratic response to Project 2025 would look like, and by that, the Heritage Foundation's conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration.

33:51David French:So you are exploring the question of not just how to rebuild American democracy, but the importance of choosing leadership that can do that. So who are the leaders that you think would be good to help execute a so-called Project 2029 vision of what America could be?

34:12Jamelle Bouie:I honestly do not have an answer to this. Like, I really don't. That's depressing, actually.

34:17David French:It's sort of sad, right? Part of what I was writing was, relating to what I just said a little earlier, was that I think the thing that Project 2025 was truly successful at was actually sort of like communicating

34:34Jamelle Bouie:a broad vision of what they want the country to be. And I think Democrats have a lot of policies they hope to, you know, pass. But I don't think they have a broad vision of what they want the country to be, what they think the Constitution is. Not sort of what they think it allows them to do, but like what values they think it instantiates. I'll say that I want to go to something David said a little earlier and something you said too, Michelle. Like I am also anti-litmus test. I just don't think it's very politically useful. When I think of, you know, the importance of principle, it very much is actually not about a litmus test because people understand principles in all kinds of different ways.

35:19Jamelle Bouie:But I do think that it is important to be able to articulate kind of just a set of principles and values and not kind of vague ones about, oh, you know, we all want security and that kind of thing. But it's something that is substantive, right? That, you know, if I think about my own values, right, like I am an egalitarian and I believe very deeply in the promise of like a multiracial democracy where all people are welcome in this country to participate in self-governance. That's what I believe in. And are there Democrats who talk like that, right, who can say this is what I believe in? This is what I want the country to be.

36:01Jamelle Bouie:And if you also want the country to be like this, you should vote for me.

36:05David French:How are we going to fit that on a hat, Jamel?

36:08Jamelle Bouie:We can disagree about all kinds of issues, right? This isn't about issues. We can disagree about the proper role of the level of taxation. We can disagree about even tough ones like abortion. But what do you want the country to be? And it's fully stipulated. What do I know? I've never run an election. No, no, no.

36:28David French:But I'm saying, like, I'm serious about the hat thing. You've got to figure out a way. This is your mission. You've got to figure out a way to boil that down so that it can be sold on the campaign trail. Because, you know, politics is no place for nuance. But if you can come up with a way to take your vision and come up with a bumper sticker, you probably can rule the world.

36:48Michelle Cottle:A hat, a bumper sticker, a pin. You know, one of the challenges on that is that you've got a kind of bifurcated electorate because you've got a lot of people in the electorate who are really focused very much on the kitchen table issues. You know, I want lower prices. I want no crime. You've got a whole other part of the electorate that it's not that they're not focused on that, but they recognize that we are in an extraordinary time, just an extraordinary time where what is being fought over isn't just what's the best policy for reducing the price of eggs. but what's being fought over is the nature of the American experiment itself.

37:28Michelle Cottle:And so if I was thinking of, you know, what is a political party I would be drawn to? I would be drawn to one that is the party of the American creed. That is, you know, that all men are created equal. We're endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. Among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I want to be on that party. And the reason why I doubled down on it is because that is on the right in particular is a very live argument. Is this a creedal nation or is this a nation that is rooted in a different, in your identity, your racial identity, your religious identity? And so that is a very much of a big battle on the right.

38:07Michelle Cottle:And it's about liberalism, small L liberalism itself. But I don't, you know, I'm not naive. I know that putting that something like that out is like Like millions of people would be like, what?

38:20David French:Your challenge then, again, is still you have to tie that to how it will make life better for the people who don't have time to think about big picture issues and are trying to put eggs on the table. So, again, if you can figure that one out, I will come run both your campaigns. I mean, Jamel Bowie, David French, 2028. Okay. We're going to end with that and move on to everyone's favorite recommendations. All right. Got anything to get us into summer mood, David?

38:53Michelle Cottle:Oh, so we're going to, this is going to be published on Saturday. So we're still going to be in the middle of my recommendation is if you are not an NBA basketball fan, if you've not watched the finals, you need to be watching the finals. Okay. So two things are happening at once. Number one, you have the emergence of potentially a generational talent, perhaps could be not just the greatest basketball player of all time, but one of the most unique athletes of all time in Victor Wimbanyama. Just an incredibly compelling figure on and off the court. And then on the other side, you have the New York Knicks who are on just this incredible run that hasn't been seen for a long time and by some measures in basketball ever.

39:38Michelle Cottle:But here's what's so fun about it. I'm enjoying the Knicks because I'm enjoying Knicks fans. They're losing their minds. It's hilarious. I mean, just the level of hysteria is just so fun to watch in this moment. Like we're just, it's like, you feel like life kind of beats you down. Just being around a group of people who are in the middle of just this most exquisite joy is so much fun. So tune in.

40:09David French:I'm all about the joy.

40:11Jamelle Bouie:Jamel? I don't have any sports recommendations, but it's summer movie season, summer blood pressure season, and I have a little ritual where the one thing that I do watch every summer is the entire Mission Impossible series.

40:26David French:Oh, dear God.

40:27Jamelle Bouie:Oh. It's, what, eight movies at this point? Oh, jeez. And they're all terrific. So I would highly recommend picking up a film in the Mission Impossible series and giving it a spin. And if there's any one of these you should watch on like a big TV with a nice sound system, it's Mission Impossible Fallout. That movie is incredible. It's in the theater. It's sort of like a theater-shaking film. It came out when my wife was pregnant with her first child. And we went like a couple days before my wife gave birth. and we were kind of almost hoping that the movie would like cause... Jostle something? Jostle something.

41:06Jamelle Bouie:It didn't, but it was a great time. So, that's my recommendation.

41:12David French:Okay, I probably have the stamina for two of these, but other than that, that sounds like a very big commitment, but I will take your recs and watch a couple of these. So, I want to go in a musical direction and invite people to check out Stephen Wilson Jr. Jr. It's kind of country indie rock with a kind of big dollop of grunge in it, which I know sounds weird, but it's fabulous. And the best way I know to describe his voice is he just sounds, it's haunted. And that really kind of fits with my mood a lot of the times these days. So Stephen Wilson Jr., check it out. And with that, I want to sneak in before we go, I need to sneak in an extra in-house wreck of sorts.

42:01David French:And by that, I want to urge everyone out there to check out Popcast, which is the New York Times' now weekly pop culture video podcast and chat show. So the hosts are John Caramonica and Joe Coscarelli, and they are our culture critic and culture reporters and on thursdays they you can watch or just listen to them as they sit down and chat with like the hottest musicians actors internet celebrities cultural influencers you know you can get everybody from asap rocky to anne hathaway i think they have a recent episode out um where they sit down with olivia rodrigo ahead of her new album coming out check it out new york times dot slash podcast.

42:50David French:Or you can go to youtube.com slash podcast. I highly recommend. It's great fun. And with that, we're going to land this plane. Guys, thank you. As always, we've solved the world's problems. And I hope the rest of your week is fantastic. Let's do it again.

43:07Jamelle Bouie:Yep. Problem solved.

43:10David French:All solved. We're done.

43:10Jamelle Bouie:That's what we do here. We solve the problems.

43:13David French:We're here to offer answers and slogans for hats. Thank you.

43:47Jamelle Bouie:With a collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone can build a beautiful professional online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. Head to squarespace.com slash NYT for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code NYT to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain.