Yeah, this whole idea of the all powerful DNC is false. Anyone can run as a Democrat. All the DNC can do is funnel some $ and support to another candidate.
Any single qualification is not a disqualifier, but we get to personally decide how much all of it matters to us as voters. We just had the Biden debacle and then democrats in the house hurt themselves when multiple of their older memers died in office while the margins are extremely tight.
As far as I’m concerned, age is a disqualifier. No more Boomers. Especially no more Silents.
And it’s up to the Maine Democratic Party to find the candidates in the first place.
This is a reflection of something commented before in other threads: in the USA of the last few decades, the parties are really mere fundraising shells, they don’t “develop” talent to deploy strategically.
( BTW it is of note, the other sitting US Senator from Maine is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats.)
I think part of the issue is that people entering politics with ambitions to become national figures don’t bother with the rat race any more because building an outsider brand gets you better results than working your way from state legislature to the house to the senate, and then the policians who find themselves somewhere on what used to be the pipeline have no upward mobility so they just cling to the turf they’re on for the rest of their lives.
Ayup.
See my much earlier post on that issue in this thread; which I note was not answered.
Is that all? Money? I’m sure glad that isn’t a factor in elections.
I think there should be age limits in all federal positions, but we don’t have them, so it’s a case by case matter. Mills is clearly the better democrat for the job. And Roy Cooper is the best candidate in North Carolina. Omg hE’S A bOomEr !!!?!??!!
What is it your hoping for with the younger generations? Some progressive utopia? I can’t see it when it comes to white voters. And whites make up the majority in most districts nationwide. Trump won the white vote in every age demographic in all three elections. I don’t care if a candidate is 100 years old. If they can unseat a republican, then IDGAF what idiotic ‘generation’ label is tacked on to their bio.
Or Chellie Pingree (their other Representative, along with Golden), or any of the 20 Democrats in the state senate, or any of the 75 Democrats in the state House. Or probably some other state-level positions that I don’t know enough about Maine politics to name off the top of my head and don’t feel like researching. Or the mayors of any of the larger cities in the state. Out of a hundred choices, some of them have to be better than Mills, and I imagine that all of them are better than known-Nazi Platner.
Embarrassing? Maybe a bit. But not nearly as embarrassing as nominating an actual Nazi.
If I thought the man was actually a Nazi, then no. But I sure as hell wouldn’t be happy about it.
Of course there will be no utopia. But at some point there has to be turnover. A political position is not meant to be some sort of lifetime job and the longer positions stay bottled up the less representative the legislative bodies get. And that’s before you get onto the knock-on effects of having a very old government. Ted Kennedy being basically useless and then dying early in the Obama administration. Feinstein being basically gone all the time. The Democrats had three members of the House die just in the last year. Judicially, Ginsburg refusing to retire when the Democrats still held the Senate and could have forced a replacement through under Obama.
I agree I would vote for Mills over Planter.
I had to double check the dates on all the posts because all this stuff was litigated months ago. This dude fucking sucks and in incredibly obvious ways. He is very obviously lying about the timeline of the totenkopf stuff and he doesn’t have the decency to lie well.
Jewish Insider first reported:
But according to a person who socialized with Platner when he was living in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, Platner had specifically acknowledged that the tattoo was a Totenkopf, the “death’s head” symbol adopted by an infamous Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps in World War II.
“He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” the former acquaintance told Jewish Insider recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue. “He said it in a cutesy little way.”
The exchange occurred in 2012 at Tune Inn, a popular dive on Capitol Hill where Platner later worked as a bartender and was a frequent patron while he attended The George Washington University on the G.I. bill, according to the former acquaintance. He would often take his shirt off drinking with friends late at night at the bar, and on at least one occasion had stated he knew what the tattoo represented, the former acquaintance recalled.
This was followed up by corroboration from CNN’s KFile
CNN also spoke with an acquaintance of Platner from more than a decade ago who said Platner spoke about his tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. A second person told CNN that they learned of the tattoo years ago from the acquaintance, who told them that Platner had described it as a Nazi-style design.
CNN also reviewed a text chain between the acquaintance and another person discussing Platner’s Nazi-like tattoo several months ago, before the story became public.
Platner’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
Finally, Platner’s own former political director quit the campaign with very specific details:
In a Tuesday interview with the Bangor Daily News, former state Rep. Genevieve McDonald, who resigned Friday from serving as Platner’s political director, said the campaign has been aware of the tattoo since she joined the campaign in August. Platner himself told her roughly a month ago he had a tattoo that “could be problematic,” she said.
The campaign denied that, calling it “a lie from a disgruntled former employee.” In a statement, Platner said he didn’t know until last week that his tattoo had a Nazi affiliation in any way.
The last one is what moved him into the “this dude really fucking sucks” column for me. Trotting out the tired “disgruntled former employee” line and willing to deliberately destroy the reputation of someone who was formerly close to him just so he wouldn’t have to suffer some blowback or tarnish his reputation. I don’t care to what extent he does or does not hold Nazi views because it’s irrelevant, he does not care about his principles and he does not care about the people of Maine if they at all come into conflict with his own personal prospects which, if you’re coming in remotely from the left, it’s a guarantee that your personal comfort will be tested by your beliefs.
This is reminding me of Eric Adams all over again when people on this board, the voters in New York and prominent political pundits were all gaga for him and were violently hushing down any suggestions that this guy might fucking suck. I was looking at this in incredulity and being like, “guys, how the fuck are you not seeing how much this guy sucks?” and he proceeded to be the complete disappointment that exceeded even how much I could have predicted he would suck. (In all fairness, Fetterman totally fooled me and I was the one dismissing the people who were predicting all the ways he would suck).
This just feels like Lucy and the football all over again when everyone’s going to be surprised all over again when he doesn’t turn out to be the leftist champion people are desperately trying to stuff him into being. He’s a cynical grifter that’s riding an opportunistic wave and will turn on this dime as willingly as he’s turned on all of his previous dimes and you can’t say you weren’t warned.
Platner is now saying there’s nothing wing with his tattoo and he was wrongly pressured into covering it up. Shame on pod save America for prepping him up and shame on the national party for prepping up Mills in order to stop now left wing members from laughing a shot in the primary.
It was apparent from the beginning that the number of Jews in Maine is easily dwarfed by the number of far-leftists who are obsessed with taking down The Jew and would accordingly support Platner’s mania about Israel and constant signaling that he’s of the DSA/Omar/Tlaib/Khanna tendency. The question was always, would relying on the second group for a Democratic primary alienate enough people in the middle who are not Jewish but have a fundamental problem with conspiratorial, racist politics to make it a net negative? Platner has calculated, based on the past few weeks of discourse on the left and the increasing reach of embrace or at least indifference to anti-Jewish rabble-rousing among formerly normal liberal institutions, that it is not. He’s signalling that he’s the guy for the far left and the far right horseshoe crossover voters to go all-in on in the primary, because he’ll give them what they want if he gets power.
Do you have a source? Not that I don’t believe you, but I’d like a link to include when I tell people “I told you so”.
Daily Mail, but they’re quoting a substack that was created by legitimate journalists.
A little anecdotal context from Maine…
My town has gone against Trump about 65:35 in the past few election cycles. There are multiple Platner signs just on my rural road, including in the yard of the folks who organized for Mills in the last gubernatorial election. There may be one, but I can’t think of seeing a single Mills sign anywhere in the surrounding communities.
And there isn’t a lot of conversation around the race, at least in my (liberal) friend group. People are generally OK with Mill’s performance as governor, but also pretty confident that Collins would beat her in the general election, which polling supports. Local media has covered Platner’s tattoo and the podcast, but I haven’t heard any local concerns that he’s an actual Nazi, or some manner of Trojan Horse candidate. Those of us not sporting yard signs clearly have some concerns our neighbors lack, but I’m only aware of one person who plans to leave the ballot blank in November if Platner is on it. I think most of us take the position that this is what primaries are for, and that we’d rather have Fetterman 2.0, if there’s any chance that it breaks the MAGA grip on the levers of power, than another round of Collins.
In an ideal world, we’d have a candidate to get excited about, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. As mentioned up-thread, Jared Golden, the (D) representative of the (R) 2nd Congressional District, is not running for re-election in part because he spent the last Thanksgiving in a hotel due to threats against his family’s safety. I know I wouldn’t want to be in Congress, so I can hardly blame others for not running.
I think it’s also worth noting that a lot of the oxygen in the local Liberal room has been taken up by the recent ICE surge. I suspect that if Maine hadn’t been targeted there would have been more focus on Platner and Mills.
Maybe Platner has a better chance of beating Collins than Mills does. I don’t know, but maybe. But Mills running against Collins has a better chance of achieving Democratic control of the Senate than Platner running against her. Because if Platner wins the primary, it’ll hurt all Democrats, in all of the Senate races, because the Republicans will be able to pain the Democratic Party as the ones in bed with Nazis.
An interesting tidbit in the Mail article;
During the interview he also recommended the war movie Come and See, which prominently and repeatedly shows the similar ‘Totenkopf’ on Nazi uniforms.
‘Everybody should watch Come and See,’ he said.
So his favorite movie of all time is LITERALLY a WWII film about Soviet partisans fighting the SS in Belarus, and he wants us to believe he didn’t know what a totenkopf was.
You’re supposed to wait until AFTER you get elected to reveal you’re full of shit.
Interestingly, MA Senator Elizabeth Warren has endorsed Platner today. I find Warren politically to be pretty savvy, in general, so I am a bit surprised to see her taking this risky move, given all the allegations against Platner.
Warren is currently 76 years old and became a joke in the national Democratic Party after the nonstop buffoonery of her 2020 presidential campaign. If she wants a base for any future national aspirations, or to head off a primary challenge for her Senate seat either from the left or from the “old people bad” wing of the party, then becoming a member of the Every Issue Is Actually About Israel Being Bad caucus is probably a smart move. The DSA fanatics accepted Marjorie Taylor Greene because she’s with them on that issue, they’ll certain accept Warren.