Graham Platner Is Staying in the Race

0:05You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since Donald Trump's populist rhetoric first began to resonate with voters, particularly disaffected white voters, the Democratic Party has been looking for candidates who could talk more convincingly about economic insecurity and other related issues. There's been an emphasis on people who seem to be outside the party establishment, particularly working people and military veterans too.

0:51Graham Plattner checked a lot of those boxes. He had served in the Marines and in the Army, and coming home to Maine, he took over a small oyster farming business. Plattner was recruited to run for the Senate seat that's been held for a long time by Susan Collins. But early in his campaign, the picture got a little complicated. Comments that Plattner had made over the years on Reddit and elsewhere began to surface, and you probably heard about this. He called police officers bastards and said victims of sexual assault should, quote, take some responsibility for themselves. He used homophobic slurs, and he made remarks about black people, rural whites, kind of everybody.

1:31and one of his tattoos was said to resemble a Nazi symbol, though he points out that he didn't quite realize that when he got it. Plattner apologized and he apologized repeatedly. He covered up the tattoo. But some progressive groups have said, maybe this guy is just not cut out for the job. Grand Plattner's campaign will be, among other things, an indicator of how much the rules of politics have changed and not only in the MAGA movement. I spoke with Graham Plattner last week.

2:05Graham, from what I know, you were recruited to run for senator. And what was happening? You were driving around in your car and some guy calls you up and says, because we want you to run for senator? Tell me the story. No, not quite. No. My wife and I were down in Brooklyn, Maine, where we shuck oysters at the Brooklyn General Store. And we were driving home. It's about a little over an hour drive. So it was like nine o 'clock at night. And I get a phone call. from an unknown number. And it's a gentleman asking if it's me, and I said yes, and saying that they were at my mother's restaurant, they'd stopped in for dinner, and that they wanted to talk to me about a project to recruit a candidate in Maine to run for U.S.

2:48Senate. And I've been engaged in a lot of community organizing, and through that I've made lots of friends around the state in the organizing world. So I assumed that they were just calling to ask me for names. And so I was like, ah, it's late at night. We can't. So if you want to come over tomorrow morning before I go out on the boat for coffee, that sounds good. And what time do you go out on the boat? Well, I wanted to come over at 4.30, but my wife told me that was too early to invite people over to the house. So I told them 6, I think, or 5.30, something like that. So yeah, they came over and made it clear that they were part of this project with the main AFL-CIO, a couple of labor union groups trying to recruit a candidate.

3:32And I started listing off names and essentially they were like, no, you don't understand where we think you would be a good candidate. And my wife and I laughed and said, that's insane because it is. We make$60 ,000 a year. And the Senate is not for people like us, or at least we don't really, you know, I'd never thought of running for United States Senate. But then essentially, they came back with the harder sell and an idea about how this could actually look. And at that point, we decided that it was the right thing to do. Tell me a little bit about your political experience. You refer to community organizing.

4:14You're working a long day. Tell me about the time that you spent outside the workday and what you were doing. It's farming is farming is farming. So you've got your in-season where you're out. For me, I'm on the boat pretty much all day long, all summer. It's very busy. In the winter months starting after December through April, I tend to have a bit more free time. And in that time, I put time into organizing around mostly local economic justice issues or social justice issues. And it's what I've been kind of at the extent of my politics outside of local governance, where I've been the chair of the planning board and also was harbor master.

5:00And those are areas that I enjoyed thoroughly. I mean, it is something to be able to write policy, implement it, and then essentially see the outcome of it within a week's time. Only at the local level do I think you actually get to engage with things like that. Graham, tell me a little bit about you for a very brief time. We were at a pretty distinguished prep school. Very briefly. It didn't last very long. Yeah, what happened? I got thrown out. What did you get thrown out for? I didn't go to class. I went to a very small rural middle school, and my mother wanted me to have a better education, I suppose.

5:40So she had me apply to a bunch of these, like, New England prep schools. We got a really good financial aid package from Hotchkiss in Connecticut. Right. So she sent me down there. I didn't want to go. I went down and just had a—I'd never been around that level of wealth before. I felt out of place. And then I figured out very quickly that if I didn't go to class, then I got to go home. And that is exactly what happened. That was the conclusion you drew. Much to my mother's chagrin. How did she react? Poorly. She was very—I did not get to go on the family vacation that year. I had to stay home with my dad.

6:22How did they react to your decision to go into the military? And tell me about that. Yeah, my dad became a teacher so he could not get drafted during Vietnam. He thought the war in Iraq was deeply stupid. I did too, to be fair. So he thought my joining the Marine Corps was just a, or enlisting, was not a good use of my time. And he was afraid I was going to go fight and die in a stupid war. Like he had seen friends from his generation. When you look back on it, why did you go into the military? If you thought the war was stupid, it was just a thing that a young man can do to rebel in some way?

7:01Since my earliest memories, I wanted to be a soldier. I grew up loving military history. I did civil war reenacting. I really, and I don't know why. I don't have an answer. I think about this fairly often. And it was just something that spoke to me. I mean, for me, it was an inevitability. After graduation, I was working for the Appalachian Mountain Club. I'd spent two years in the professional trail crew in the White Mountains. So I went back to work for the AMC for the summer. And then I deferred a year to go to college to keep my parents happy. But I knew what I was doing. I knew that I wasn't going to go.

7:48How did the reality of Iraq and being a soldier match with what you had imagined? So I went into it, I think, in many ways more informed and already fairly cynical than most. I read a lot of literature from the Vietnam War in high school. One of my favorite books was A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. about John Paul Van, who was a very competent and great soldier who then found himself in a war that he thought was being fought poorly. So when I got to Iraq, early on, I thought it was working. I mean, I remember coming home from my first deployment and telling people that, like, I was wrong because I'd been against the war.

8:38And I was wrong that I was wrong. I was, in fact, right the first time around. Um, but I, I really believe what I, what I interacted with was what I thought were tactical failures. I thought that we weren't doing the thing properly. I, I really believed in, in the concept of counterinsurgency. By the time I got out of the Marine Corps in 08, Petraeus and, and General Mattis had written the counterinsurgency manual. There was this whole like ream of thinking that the United States military really need to focus on this counterinsurgency concept. So I started reading all the old writings from the French and the British and Malaya.

9:18And I really believed, truly believed that we had just been doing it wrong. That it wasn't that it as a concept was a failure. And it's so funny now looking back on it because you can read guys in Vietnam having the exact same realization and then coming to the exact same realization that I eventually did too, which is that, ah, it's not a tactical failure. This whole thing is a failed concept. It cannot work. Strategically, yeah. Strategically, it's not going to work. But, you know, when you're young and you're engaged in something and you want to believe in it, you want to make it work, I really, I threw my heart and soul into it.

9:59Graham, you know, I was thinking about you in the last couple of days, knowing that we'd be talking and I was, this past Sunday was just a miserable day. You know, the news from Providence, Rhode Island, and then the news from Sydney, Australia, and then the day ending with the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. And then what followed is the president of the United States issuing a truth social post that just betrayed, I mean, it wasn't surprising in a sense, which is part of what's so awful about it. But it just, the idea that somebody holding that sense of responsibility would say something so morally bankrupt and worse.

10:45But we also know that human beings say some pretty stupid things over time. And you've had to contend with this. You know, your comments on Reddit from the past came up. An issue of your tattoo became infamous because of the link to a Nazi symbol. And you've apologized repeatedly. How do you view the notion of what mistakes people can make and then still hold positions of real responsibility like Senate? Well, I think, one, did you do it when you were in power? I mean, I think that that's a really important thing. That if someone knows that what they say has so much gravity because other people are paying attention, like, what do you, how do you use that?

11:39How do you act in that manner? I do think that if we're going to, I'm an elder millennial. I'm 41. If we're going to rehash everyone's social media posts from their existence, people from my generation, I don't know what politics is going to look like. We'll just never get around to the policy part. So I think that there is a, I mean, if someone spends 20 years being an avowed white supremacist, yeah, that's probably a sign. If someone over the course of their time on the internet uses slurs or stupid language and then ceases to do so, probably a sign of growth. Probably a sign of how many of us change over time.

12:21How old were you when you were making these comments on Reddit and how do you look back on them? My late 20s, early 30s. Is that not old enough to know better? Well, I mean, which comment do you mean? I made a lot of comments that I'm not ashamed of. It's not as though I have this ream of comments in which I look back and I'm like, oh my God, I was a terrible person back then. Well, comments about victims of sexual assault, for example. Yeah, well, one, that comment, I made that right when I got out of the infantry. And all the, I mean, I don't know if you've read it. I sure have, yeah. Yeah. So the comment was, is that I said that people, men and women, shouldn't get too drunk and should take some personal responsibility.

13:09I also said that sexual assault didn't occur in the military as much as people said it did. It does. I learned that very quickly. I came out of the infantry. At the time, it was a male-only organization. I never interacted with it in the service. So I, for me, those comments were very much informed by my immature mindset coming out of my, frankly, 20s in the combat infantry. I then very quickly met people and had conversations and realized that I was very incorrect. Sexual assault occurred often in the military and was often covered up. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, those comments I made were at a time in my life where I was, yeah, I came out of the combat infantry.

13:57When you decided to run for the Senate, which is a gigantic leap for anybody, much less somebody who hasn't been in politics for a long time or conventional politics, did you think to yourself, I'm going to have a problem because of these past comments? No. If you believe in transformational politics, which I do, you need to believe in the ability for people to change, for people to grow. If we are all just ossified in who we are right now, then there is no point to this. if we can't ever give people the ability to change minds if we can't give people the ability to grow as human beings then we're all and we're all just stuck i mean what we also know this isn't true people grow all the time and for me this as uncomfortable as it is and personally unenjoyable to have to talk about stupid things i said on the internet 13 years ago it also allows me to publicly model something I think is really important, which is that a lot of us go through transitions in life.

15:07A lot of us change our minds, have new experiences, meet new people, are informed by those experiences and come to different conclusions. Our politics change, our views on the world change. And again, while it's not fun to do this for me, it also really gives me the opportunity to very publicly show that you can believe things once and then you can, over time, believe other things. You can change your language, change the way you think about stuff, change the way you talk. And I think that's a good thing to model. I think it's, and that, and that, that isn't something that is, that you should be ashamed of.

15:52you should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person you can think about the world in a different way

16:04I'm speaking with Graham Plattner who's running for a Senate seat in the state of Maine we'll continue in a moment this is the New Yorker Radio Hour

16:49Transcription by CastingWords God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

17:01This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Graham Plattner of Maine. Plattner is a Democrat and running for the Maine Senate seat held for 28 years by Susan Collins, the Republican. Now, Democrats think that seat could be theirs in the next election if the right candidate runs against her. Janet Mills, the state's popular governor, is also running in the primary. Mills is 77 and considered more of a centrist. It's early to cite polls, but at this point, it looks like either Mills or Plattner would be in a tight race in the general election against Susan Collins.

17:39I'll continue my conversation now with Graham Plattner. I want to get into how you see the world, and I want to get a sense of how you see the Democratic Party these days and what you intend to do to help transform it. I think the Democratic Party today's biggest problem is that there is an element of it that has become as attached to corporate interests as the Republican Party is. And by the way, this isn't just like my opinion. I mean, everybody thinks this. Everybody, will you hear people say things like, I don't vote because it doesn't matter. Both sides are the same, all that kind of stuff.

18:24And I don't, I don't agree with that. I mean, there's a reason I'm running as a Democrat. There's a reason I'm running. If I thought that none of this, if there was no hope, I wouldn't do this. I have an immense amount of hope. However, I do think that there is an innate contradiction in trying to be a party that represents working people, representing those that struggle, those that labor, those that are often exploited or taken advantage of. It is impossible to represent their interests while also trying to represent the interests of those that exploit them. I think that that is a fundamental contradiction that you cannot get past.

19:05And my problem is that the Democratic Party used to be the party that represented those people. It was the party of labor unions. It was the party of thinking of large structural change that brought about things like Social Security or Medicaid and Medicare. It was the party that understood that protecting working people was going to require some form of imposition on those with wealth and power. When do you think the Democratic Party, in your view, abandoned that? In the 1990s. In the Clinton. Under Clinton. I think the lesson that was learned after Reagan was that, and I believe it was the wrong lesson, but other people can disagree.

19:51The lesson that was learned was that, oh, the money matters. And we do have to kind of lean into this government's bad. We should lean into the kind of deregulation corporate side of things. And in doing so, the party sold out organized labor. And the party in many ways sold out that kind of, that the movement side of our politics. Did you feel that Barack Obama, for example, was in the same camp as Bill Clinton in that way? Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, 2008 Financial crisis happens, right? There was a moment. I mean, and Obama's on record saying this. There was a moment where there were two options.

20:30We give money to homeowners or we give money to the banks. And we chose to give the money to the banks. To rescue the banks, yeah. To rescue the banks. And, you know, that was an option. For me, that's just kind of indicative of this creeping influence in the Democratic Party. And this is, I think, why we often find ourselves in this weird, everybody's so confused as to what we're trying to do. Because we have Zoran Mondani on one end and Joe Manchin on the other. The argument, which you well know, is that the only kind of Democrat that's going to win in West Virginia is a Joe Manchin Democrat.

21:18Otherwise, you're going to get a MAGA Republican in West Virginia. My counter to that is that I think you can win someone in West Virginia if you run on working class populism. Um, but Joe Manchin also very much did not represent the, I mean, he's the reason that we didn't get or we couldn't renew the child tax credit. And then we just chose not to, uh, not to go, not to continue doing that. Um, that's not the behavior of someone that's representing the interest of working people. Are you getting a lot of love from the leader of the Senate caucus from Chuck Schumer? No, I am not. How would you describe the lack of love there?

22:01It's just been a lack of anything. I've made it very clear that I would love to have a conversation, would love to talk about what we're trying to do here. No one's reached out. We're almost five months into this thing. Not a single phone call, not a single email. From the National Party Organization? Yeah, from either Chuck Schumer or from the DSCC. The Senatorial Campaign Committee. I continue to not have been contacted. Governor Janet Mills has decided to run, and you've got a hot race there. Is she getting the love from the Democratic Party establishment? Well, the DSCC set up to fundraise with her the day after she announced, so my assumption is yes.

22:42I see. It looks like Schumer and the DSCC is going to endorse Janet Mills in the primary. And you've got endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna and others. How does that look on the ground in Maine? What are Maine Democrats actually feeling? How are the polls looking for you? Where are you having success? Where are you having difficulties? to be frank the the polls continue to be great for us and on and that mirrors what i feel on the ground like there is a people are fed up people are disgusted with the system as it stands and they don't think that the answers are going to come from establishment politicians who've been chosen by washington dc how will you run against susan collins presumably she's the republican nominee.

23:37And she's been in that office for a very long time, and incumbents have all kinds of advantages. Essentially the exact same way. We are building a campaign that is focused on field organizing. We're focused on building the ground game. We've held 35 town halls around the state of Maine the past couple months. We've talked to tens of thousands of Mainers already. We have 12 ,000 volunteers. Maine's not a big state. It is geographically, but it doesn't have a lot of people. And these people are from all over the state. So for me, this is very much a much, it's a larger project than merely a Senate seat.

24:15This is about rebuilding organization, organization in communities, organization and cooperation between existing groups like labor unions, community organizations, the party itself. We, in my opinion, we need to reconnect with that kind of politics, the politics of movement building. And that speaks to what people are feeling right now. People, myself included, I mean, why I'm doing this, we feel unrepresented. What do you want to get done in the Senate? What are, say, three top policies that you would concentrate on? Because you can't concentrate on everything. No. Continue pushing for universal health care and Medicare for all.

24:55We also need to restrict the ability of senators and congresspeople to trade stocks and bonds. It's essentially legalized corruption, and it needs to end. and we also need to fix the tax code because we cannot continue to tax wages at a higher rate than we tax wealth. That's a math equation that when you run to the end, it's easy to see who winds up with all the money. So those, I think those three things are going to be priorities for me legislatively. I know Medicare for all is going to be a heavy lift. The other two, I think, are going to be a much easier lift. I mean, we've already got some Republicans who are happy to come over on the stocks and bonds issue.

25:40Josh Hawley put something forward not too long ago. So I think there's definitely opportunity for wins there. Now, you've run an ad talking about how you refuse to accept money from APAC. Are there any other groups that you won't take money from? Oh, yeah, yeah. Fossil fuel packs. I mean, frankly, any large corporate pack, any dark money pack, we don't take money from them. All the money we're taking in is individual donations. All of it. We will take money from labor packs, any kind of pack that exists that's kind of, you know, not part of the corporate dark money apparatus. But that's it. So we need to know where the money comes from.

26:19That's important for us. I want to ask you a couple of questions in view of your military experience. We had former Secretary of Defense and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, on the show recently. And he said this about having thousands of troops stationed off the coast of Venezuela. He said, we're putting our men and women in uniform in harm's way. We have to assure them that the orders we give them are not going to violate the law. We're going to, in fact, defend our national security in a way that is not legally questionable. What do you make of this, especially coming from someone who saw America's forever wars really up close?

26:57I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, at this point, what we're seeing in Venezuela is just a rehash of what we saw with Iraq, but somehow even worse and even dumber, which is magnificent to behold. How is it even worse and even dumber? I mean, with Iraq, we at least had, I don't know, 10 years of previous engagement. We had UN hearings. It was at least this sort of well-crafted propaganda machine that a lot of people ate up. And this is just laughable. We're just murdering people. I think the death count now is up to 95. Yeah. We're just murdering people. No declaration of war. No even concept of why this is a war.

27:45And it's all happening, frankly, because the Republicans know that their policies are failing. The economy is getting worse. People are not happy. And the best thing to do is just drum up a war for political purposes. And I think, you know, a lot of people can see it, including a lot of Republicans. And that's what I mean by dumber. It's less sophisticated. You know, the run-up to the Iraq War, I think, was a sophisticated operation in propaganda. This is just—they realize they have the power and they can do it. And so they're doing it. And that's it. How long were you in the military, active?