Why did the culinary magazine publish a gushing profile of the Maine Democratic Senate candidate?
Today’s Morning Jolt discusses Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s past status, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s current status, as the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party.
There are few positions in life greater than being the Democrats’ Next Big Thing™; you start getting ludicrously generous coverage, even from publications that are only marginally connected to politics. Back in 2007, Men’s Vogue suddenly put former North Carolina Senator John Edwards on the cover. (An actual sentence from the profile: “The hair, up close, is peppered with tiny strands of blond. Chestnut brown and so finely trimmed, mellifluous, smooth, and feathery, it could almost be a weave, the Platonic ideal as imagined by the Hair Club for Men.”)
Back in 2008, Men’s Health declared that longtime smoker Barack Obama was one of the 25 fittest men in America. And who could forget Beto O’Rourke on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2019, declaring he was “was born” to be in the presidential race, with his glum-looking dog seeming to know how his presidential bid was going to go? Or the French fashion magazine Marie Claire putting failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on the cover in 2021?
This isn’t just garden-variety liberal media bias; these are once-apolitical publications suddenly engaged in laudatory soft-focus coverage, portraying figures as the coolest guy or gal ever. In these profiles, the not-so-political audience of the magazine usually doesn’t get told a lot about the figure’s policy positions; often those positions are airbrushed beyond recognition. (In 2017, Vogue insisted that New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was an economic centrist, an iconoclast, and a campaigning powerhouse with cross-party appeal. She was and is none of those things.)
Like a magic spell from Dungeons and Dragons, being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party also grants the bearer of that title temporary immunity to all potential criticisms and attacks. But as Walz demonstrated, once you lose that title, you also lose that immunity, and past scandals can catch up with you.
In that video, a bearded Platner, his strawberry blonde hair tousled, introduced Maine voters to the issues central to his platform, namely, broad economic populism, taxing billionaires, and universal healthcare. In a deep, gravely voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in a truck commercial, he talks about his decade of military service, and “farming oysters to feed my community.” Interspliced are shots of him hauling up oyster cages, sliding a knife into an oyster to shuck it, handing a fresh oyster to a little girl. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he growls. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”
I did (ahem) not see Platner as the type of person to warrant a long glowing profile in a culinary-focused magazine, but the profile has not yet stirred up a furor.
The candidate — photographed seated and clad in a (ahem) brown shirt — is nominally talking about how great Maine’s oysters are. But even the anecdotes about oysters inevitably get turned back into what a swell guy he is and how lucky Maine voters would be to have him representing them in the U.S. Senate.
Working as an oysterman has informed his views on issues like climate change and secure foodways, but it’s also shaped the way he relates to others—even those with whom he might disagree. His experience working on the water, he says, will directly inform how he moves in Congress. “There’s a level of cooperation that exists on the sea,” Platner says. “Out here on the water, everybody’s got a whole bunch of different political opinions, but if someone’s in trouble, everybody shows up. And that gives me a hell of a lot of hope.”
You can sense my exasperation with this soft-focus coverage, but no one can deny the effectiveness. The first poll of the Maine Democratic Party showed Platner swamping his rival, Governor Janet Mills, with a blitzkrieg of support, 58 percent to 24 percent. And while a more recent poll shows a closer race with Mills ahead, there’s no reason to think a little setback is going to send Platner off to hide in a bunker.
Hey, just out of curiosity . . . if a Republican Senate candidate said he had accidentally gotten a logo of the Nazi SS tattooed to his chest, would he be getting soft-focus glowing profiles in major culinary magazines? Nah, I don’t think so.