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“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Graham Platner’s misbegotten Senate campaign collapsed in spectacular fashion this week, a swift dismantling of what had been seen as a juggernaut that could withstand an endless series of genuinely repugnant revelations.
The man turned out not just to have red flags but to be nothing but a sentient collection of them. Now, as his backers finally, FINALLY, rush for the exits, it’s worth looking at how things got to this point.
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When it comes to who can be said to be most responsible for Platner — aside from Platner himself, of course — there’s no shortage of blame to go around. But the enthusiasm for his red-flag-laden candidacy didn’t fall neatly on one side or the other of traditional Democratic divides.
Platner had as many fans in the progressive wing of the party as he did in the centrist one. He was a darling of Intercept-adjacent types like Ryan Grim. His high-profile backers included progressive stalwarts like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But they also included the Pod Save America bros like Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau. These are not people who typically align on positions or on tactics.
They are, however, all people who, whether they admit it to themselves or not, fancy themselves kingmakers. He was everyone else’s ticket, and that made people sloppy and willing to accept things they believed were morally repugnant when others did them.
Part of what made it so easy for such a strange set of bedfellows to imprint upon Platner was that the man himself was somewhat of a cipher.
Not only had Platner not held a previous office, but he’d never even run for one. The bulk of his adult work history was in the military, a notoriously opaque institution. What we learned about Platner leaked out in dribs and drabs. Sometimes those were deliberately doled out by the campaign and his supporters, but sometimes they were things that escaped containment, bubbling up from the sludge of Platner’s Reddit history or other information sources that stubbornly could not be controlled. Only when multiple women were brave enough to come forward with credible sexual assault allegations did things finally crash down.
What ultimately did Platner in, however, was a lack of credibility. That’s not meant to diminish the facts of the allegations against him, to make some mealy-mouthed argument that the coverup was worse than the crime. Instead, it’s that there was never anything solid at his c