How did Graham Platner evade basic scrutiny? Lots of folks need to fall on their swords

I wanted to like Graham Platner, like a lot of folks, apparently. His appeal drew in the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, for good reason.

People are tired of politics as usual, and Platner, the soon-to-be defrocked U.S. Senate nominee from Maine, isn’t politics as usual – as a military veteran-turned-humble oyster farmer, though the everyman image he created for himself obscured his upper middle class upbringing as the son of a lawyer and tony restaurant owner, and the grandson of a prominent architect.

Turns out, him hiding his privileged background was the least of the worries with Graham Platner.

Even the Nazi tattoo scandal was small potatoes, considering the skeletons in the closet – first, the revelation that his wife had caught him sexting with multiple women, then the next layer, the threatening behavior alleged by former romantic interests.

The final straw: the allegation from another former romantic interest that Platner had raped her in 2021.

It’s obvious that Graham Platner is done.

The after-action report part of where we are has progressives at war with each other over those who continued to back Platner as the allegations against him began to accumulate, and those who said as far back as the Nazi tattoo controversy, It’s time to move on.

To me, the focus should be on Graham Platner, who knew from the jump that these skeletons were in his closet, and somehow thought none of it would come to public knowledge.

We can probably also fault the apparent lack of vetting by Platner’s opponents in the Democratic Party primary and the local media in Maine.

As a journo in decent standing, it’s hard for me to imagine that there weren’t loud whispers surrounding this guy who came out of literal nowhere to be the frontrunner in a U.S. Senate nomination race in the space of a few months.

I get many more emails about untoward things going on behind the scenes at various levels of local and state government and local college sports than I have time to look into, and I’m nobody.

From what we know now, Graham Platner shouldn’t have gotten past a couple of weeks of being a candidate before being relegated to the tinfoil hat section of the primary field.

As it stands, the lack of oppo research appears to be handing a winnable Senate seat back to the GOP.