Graham Platner Got Way Too Many Passes

For starters, Platner’s working-class bona fides were questionable. His grandfather was an architect, and his father was an attorney in Ellsworth, Maine. He attended private schools as a teenager. His father lent him $200,000 to buy his house, which he pays about $950 a month toward, and his mother owns a restaurant that buys his oysters. In an interview with NPR’s Leila Fadel, in June, Platner rebutted charges that he was “cosplaying” by effectively broadening his definition of working class. “If the bulk of the money that you get to live comes from wages, comes from working, and you are not just sitting on an immense amount of hoarded wealth, which generates income for you, then you work for a living,” he said.

While I’m sympathetic to that broader definition, the bulk of working-class folks who don’t have some amount of family privilege to fall back on might quibble with it. Much of Platner’s adolescence and early adulthood—being expelled from school, working odd jobs, eschewing college, serving in the Marines in Iraq before his mother helped get him into oyster farming—speaks to the kind of privilege someone with a solid middle-class upbringing knows they can rely on, not the kind of panicked effort to find solid ground I witnessed in my working-class upbringing in Arkansas.

Platner has attributed his alcohol abuse and other troubles in adulthood to PTSD related to his military deployments (he also served in Afghanistan with the National Guard). That is useful context for some of his problems but not all of them—and it’s certainly not cause enough for wholesale forgiveness. Yet, despite these setbacks, Platner continued to get extra chances to make it in society. It’s hard to imagine someone who grew up with less money and fewer connections (or anyone but a white man, for that matter) bouncing back from his checkered history and lack of professional experience to run, not just for any political office, but for a U.S. Senate seat held by a five-term incumbent—and then somehow successfully convincing voters to back him in the primary over the sitting (woman) governor.