Into the Woods: The Last of Platner

Maine woods, photo by George Wuerthner for The Rewilding Institute.

I've been sitting on the first paragraphs here for quite a while, not knowing what, if anything, I wanted to do with them, and then came Ezra Klein's interview with Morris Katz, one of the consultants responsible for the ill-fated Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, offering his own somewhat self-serving view of what went wrong, and just today Platner's replacement by an excellent candidate, former logger, labor organizer, and state senate president Troy Jackson.

I just wanted in the first place to say I was against Graham Platner before I was for him, and for some though clearly not all of the right reasons, which I think I can articulate better now than I could earlier: most particularly the way his attractively progressive policy message was getting confounded with a reactionary message that came with his packaging, as the embodiment of a theory of US politics in its current state that is both bad sociology and also lousy politics, as expressed in one way by Moira Donegan at The Guardian early in the campaign, last October:

The notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized – too dominated by women among its voters, leaders and candidates, or not sufficiently comfortable with the style of masculinity represented by Platner – has been bubbling up among left and liberal commentators with increasing insistence over the past decade. The idea is that in catering too much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering, gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need to most recruit: that is, the working class, imagined here, as they so frequently are, as brusque, bigoted, ignorant, vulgar and male.

Partly because I don't think a progressive movement should be thinking of the working class with that kind of contempt, to be honest, but also because that's not what it is, at all. It's a false picture that skips over the important issues, and it's also mistaken about where the votes are (which nowadays includes lots of relatively well educated white guys stranded in the gig economy and layoff victims of the AI chaos—they're proletarians now too). The people struggling with low wages and workplace disrespect, the working class in any decent sociological analysis, are more female, and more nonwhite; the truly brusque, bigoted, and ignorant white males are more typically well-off members of the petite bourgeoisie and resentful about tax expenditures they believe are thrown away on the undeserving poor, and unlikely to abandon the Republican party that has worked so assiduously to get the bigots on board. And I have my own ideas about the kind of masculinity we could be aiming at.

Sooner or Later God'll Cut You Down

 

Video of the 2003 recording, released three years after Cash's death, with lip-synching tribute cameos by a host of mostly engagé celebrities including, of all people, Kid Rock.

Thoughts of Johnny Cash raised by our old friend Hunter Biden, who has recently surfaced on Twitter as a first-class shitposter, answering an insult from some Republican fool using the Johnny Cash finger-giving photo as his avi:

Bravo to Hunter Biden. Well done. I like this informed swagger.

[image or embed]

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 7:53 PM

Note how he's not by any means suggesting he's as cool as Johnny Cash; he's reminding us that Cash was once as low and fucked up as Hunter Biden has ever been, and for a pretty long while before he ended up the great songwriter and performer we all remember with fondness and awe. Which Hunter is not, presumably, at least not yet, but he's working on himself and getting better.

And also of what a flaming liberal Cash became too, something the Republican fool clearly has no idea of—not mixing it up with party politics, but working with the deprived and defeated, stressing the liberal message that, as Hunter put it, no one is past saving. If you've done some horrible stuff in your life, you can try to be better. And God will surely cut you down either way.

Which brings us inevitably to the Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner, whose primary is tomorrow. Well, maybe not that inevitably. 

I was kind of hoping to have finished writing about Platner,  but then came the new allegations, in The New York Times, no less, that he had not only joined the Marines and served in the abominable Afghanistan and Iraq wars, entered some kind of connection with the horrible Blackwater company or something related to it, and at some point in a Croatian tattoo parlor gotten himself a tattoo with the insignia of the elite "Totenkopf" 3rd Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS (a paramilitary organization of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei that operated independently of the German Army, and certainly committed some really horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity), and posted some pretty awful and politically incorrect posts on Reddit,—but also apparently been kind of shitty with between one and three of six women he dated between around 2013 and 2021 that The Times was able to interview, promiscuous, drinking to excess, and in the one case possibly something akin to violence.

And then posted a bunch of "sexually explicit messages" with some other women in 2023, around the time he got married; it was his wife Amy Gertner who revealed the last in fall 2025 to a campaign aide, Genevieve McDonald, who thereupon resigned from the campaign (over the Totenkopf and the Reddit posts) and then months later, it seems, passed the story to The Wall Street Journal and The Times:

In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by “the invasion of our privacy.”

“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”

“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”

What Platner has in common with Johnny Cash and Hunter Biden is that arc of a life story from horrible behavior through regret to trying to be better, in his case, as I was saying in the earlier post, through therapy, his counselor (primarily for PTSD), hers, and the one they share for marriage counseling. It's a great story of redemption. Honestly, it's a great story whether it's true or not, and the other thing, which is vitally important, is that enough Maine voters seem to have bought it, women in particular, according to polling from last week:

The survey of 650 likely Maine voters shows Platner has the support of 48% of respondents, compared to 43% for Collins, with 6% undecided and 2% supporting another candidate. A gender gap exists among polltakers who back each candidate: 54% of women and 42% of men support Platner, while Collins earns the support of 35% of women and 51% of men. 

And of course they hate Trump, the Iran war, and the price of gas, And it's their decision. It's interesting he has so much less support from men, and it may have something to do with his earnest denial of the toxic masculinity he started with (I'm sure his main reason for joining hte Marines was to piss off his sensible bourgeois parents),, and use of therapeutic language, his continual admission that he used to be bad (this was the campaign tactic I was urging him to adopt in May, and he's done it—also it's completely unlike John Fetterman, who has never acknowledged doing anything wrong, and also adopted a more "popularist" list of policies compared to Platner's openly leftist one). He's working on it, and that doesn't happen in a straight line and may not happen at all, but you're not getting certainty.

Platner's done plenty of retail politicking, Maine-style, and they feel they know him. I kind of doubt the new stories have changed that significantly any more.than the earlier ones did. I'm not saying I believe his story in detail or I don't, I'm saying at this point it's none of my business, but I'm absolutely convinced it could work out just fine, OK?

Notes on Platner

Note: Revised this quite a bit for the Substack version, too lazy to redo it here,

All-electric zero-emission Freightliner Cascadia 2025, by Daimler Truck North America, via Beverage Industry.

Over the weekend, presumptive Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner released his "Take Back American Power" energy plan, attacking the ferocious rise in energy prices that Americans including Mainers have been suffering with over the last couple of years for heating, driving, and running farm equipment: he offers to cut prices by eliminating the federal gas and diesel tax; subjecting oil companies to the windfall profits tax proposed by the Biden administration in 2022 and currently pushed under the leadership of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Ro Khanna, which is supposed to encourage them to stop price gouging; and inviting states to freeze or lower their electrical utility rates in return for money to finance low-cost clean-energy infrastructure projects (carrying on the legacy of the Biden Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021). 

And a bunch of other stuff, including a genuinely socialist-sounding supplement to the Biden Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program but bypassing the private capital, which

would issue debt backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, and partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly to utilities, rural electric co-operatives, public energy authorities, and other developers of low-risk clean energy projects. Developers of fully permitted, shovel-ready transmission lines or offshore wind projects, for example, could tap the Infrastructure Fund at rates close to the federal funds benchmark – considerably lower than their borrowing costs on private debt and equity markets – and pass tens of billions in savings on to ratepayers.

That's an Elizabeth Warren proposal, and the most interesting thing in the list to me, though I'm pretty enthusiastic about the windfall profits tax (per barrel of oil, charging 50% of the difference between the prices of the current year and the previous year), which has a realistic prospect of passing if we elect a Democratic Congress in November, which is of course more likely if Platner takes the Maine seat from Concerned Susan Collins.

The canceling of the federal gas and diesel tax, in contrast, seems more than a bit off target, given the tax's aim of discouraging fossil fuel use while funding clean energy projects. Whitehouse-Khanna have a better proposal with their version of the windfall profits tax, offering cash rebates to everybody (including nondrivers). Besides, the federal gas tax is apparently a pretty modest part of the cost of driving, substantially less than state and local gas taxes, to say nothing of what drivers have been paying on top of that for Trump's Iran war, per this NBC report (whole chart at the link):