With the Platner disaster, it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to confront how easily it was manipulated by ideologues.
With the Platner disaster, it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to confront how easily it was manipulated by ideologues.
T he Bulwark’s Sam Stein responded bloodlessly to the early June allegations in the New York Times that Graham Platner had physically abused at least one woman, with another claiming to have had an “unsettling” experience with the Senate candidate so traumatic she wouldn’t relate the details. “The knives are fully out for the firm chiefly behind Graham Platner’s rise,” Stein wrote. As if the real victims here were the political consultants who facilitated Platner’s rise.
“Best not miss,” replied 26-year-old Morris Katz, a political media strategist who “helped orchestrate the greatest political upset of the decade,” as the New York Times put it, when he helped Zohran Mamdani oust Andrew Cuomo from public life. Well, it looks like they did not miss.
Jenny Racicot might never have come forward with graphic claims of what she calls “rape” — an episode in which Platner is alleged to have drunkenly and violently forced himself on her — if the progressive activist class had not concluded that Platner’s first named accuser, Lyndsey Fifield, was lying to advance her conservative politics. “My part of the story was just a read-over,” Racicot said of the vague allegations against Platner that she, too, relayed to the Times. Who could begrudge Racicot’s frustration?
It wasn’t just Platner who assured the public that the Times story would be the last sordid tale from the candidate’s history. Katz, too, implied that progressives had nothing to worry about. “What I can say is Graham Platner has addressed his past repeatedly — more than I’ve ever seen any candidate have to talk about their past,” he told MS NOW last month. “He’s talked about — very honestly and openly — about not being the world’s greatest boyfriend when he got home from war, about struggling with PTSD, with depression, with drinking too much, with going down dark rabbit holes on the internet.”
All these excuses for Platner’s conduct weren’t necessary, of course, because the women claiming misconduct had issued “false allegations,” Katz added. “The way we talk about what scandals are and what issues are on, kind of, national television or in the political establishment, is fundamentally disconnected from the lives Mainers are living.” For example, Susan Collins is married to a lobbyist. Really, what’s the difference between that and multiple credible claims of physical assault and sexual abuse?
Katz and other Democrats who became invested in the Platner campaign did their best to promulgate the notion that sexual violence is just something you have to expect from combat veterans — a profoundly insulting insinuation not unlike the claim that Platner is what you get when you set out to meet the American working class where they live. The Times contributed to Katz’s preferred myth, deeming him “a kind of casting director for a future Democratic Party whose members wear Carhartt and aren’t afraid to say ‘hell’ and ‘damn.’”
It was all nonsense. And it was not harmless. Not only did the progressive effort to downplay the allegations against Platner once again victimize the women on whom he preyed, but the campaign has also made fools of credulous progressives and sacrificed the Democratic Party’s claim to believe women — even those who don’t share their politics.
Katz helped craft the fabricated everyman persona Platner pitched to Mainers, but he wasn’t alone. In a now-infamous interview with the Wall Street Journal, the overeducated couple who vetted Platner’s past — Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan — did little to conceal the disdain with which they approached their jobs.
Moraff chuckled as he described the “stuff” they got back from the firm they approached to do a background check on Platner, some of which you might have “seen on the news.” But the vetting did not turn up the Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, he claimed. It might have uncovered “some” of the candidate’s Reddit posts, in which Platner mused about how black people don’t tip and why women who are victims of sexual assault should audit how their conduct invited their abuse. Nevertheless, Moraff was unfazed. “I thought, ‘None of this will or should stop him,’” the operative insisted. After all, voters don’t want candidates who were “grown in vats and had never done and said anything that they might regret their entire lives.”
No, that’s what Moraff wanted. He was willing to look past disqualifying conduct because he put his progressive politics above the Democratic Party’s institutional health. That’s what Katz concluded, too. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” he told the New Yorker last year. If so, then Katz is not a political professional. He’s a fan.
Both consultants subordinated professional discretion to their romantic attachment to progressive politics. That, in concert with their hostility toward the party they set out to subvert and coopt, has now imperiled Democratic prospects in a seat that they must win if they hope to retake the Senate.
Slowly, the obstacles that have rendered the two major parties hostages to their most unrepresentative activist classes are falling away. But no Supreme Court decision could give Democrats enough self-respect to stand up to insurgents willing to dispense with scruples in their efforts to hijack the party.
Both parties need to rediscover that sort of courage. But, today, it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to confront how easily it was manipulated by ideologues and how willing they were to turn over the reins to vandals who hold their institutional home in unveiled contempt.