By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Andy Warhol became famous for painting soup cans. Then he painted celebrities, then he painted electric chairs, car accidents, and dollar bills. He got rich from his art but he kept his sense of humor. He had funny ideas about fame in particular. In the future, he predicted, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Fame meant nothing special to Andy.
Maine’s Democrats have proved him right. An oyster farmer named Graham Platner came out of nowhere to run for the Senate against Susan Collins, the last moderate Republican still surviving in the wild. He entered the primary as an angry progressive and he handily defeated the establishment’s preferred candidate. Everyone fell in love. Elizabeth Warren paid him court. The New York Times ranked him with Mamdani and AOC. Then his candidacy imploded.
First he had to explain his Nazi tattoo. Then he had to explain why he had said such vile things on the internet. Then he had to explain why so many women were complaining about him. Then, finally, he could only try but fail to explain why one of them was claiming he had raped her. He finally bowed out and his party has been forced to pick a replacement on the fly. Platner left public life with a snarling statement expressing his disdain for those who had fought the people’s first choice. He truly had been angry all along.
Spare him a thought, though. He had been specially recruited to run that race and by all accounts he had been reluctant to engage. Professional campaign operatives from out of state came looking for a candidate who suited their agenda. One had worked for Bernie Sanders in Massachusetts. Another had championed Mamdani in New York. Another had taught at Berkeley. So they all knew what they wanted for the state of Maine: magical thinking.
They stumbled upon Platner, who must have seemed like a natural case for Ivy League socialism, because he claimed to be poor but he came from a well-off family. He went to private schools, his parents bankrolled the purchase of his home, and his mother was his small business’s primary customer (she owned a fancy restaurant). But above all else, he was a veteran with a volatile past and a gift for voicing today’s left-wing mantras: poor people can’t afford health care, rich people have too much money, and Israel is evil. He had made himself known in local advocacy groups and he impressed his visiting suitors with his gruff demeanor and ability to use actual nouns and verbs when speaking. The rest was a wild ride into Warholian fame and personal frustration. Professionals survive these debacles. Amateurs go home.
Lessons abound but they also conflict. Those who plucked him from his oyster boat obscurity and tossed him into politics in the first place stress that people are angry, they’re so angry they’ll even take an angry guy with a Nazi tattoo, and the national party had better like it. Those who opposed him stress that this year’s politics of the new is bound to be filled with untested flakes and the national party had better be more careful. His former fans are also coming out of the woodworks now to call him a Bernie Bro who just hates women, because the Democratic establishment remains in thrall to their signature theory of original sin (rejecting Hillary Clinton got us Donald Trump, and the only reason to have opposed Clinton was because she was female) (neat, tidy, and wrong). The Trump wing of the Republican Party (also known as the Republican Party) is laughing, because their opposition seems incapable of tying their own shoelaces. And Sue Collins is just waiting and watching.
A final thought on that Nazi tattoo. Platner denied knowing what it was and said he was young and foolish anyway. But the fact is, nobody cared.
For many hard years, Israel’s defenders could respond to its critics honestly: it could not make peace with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah because those organizations did not want peace, they only wanted Israel’s destruction. Nobody could answer that. But today’s progressives can, and their answer echoes that of Hamas and Hezbollah: Israel, alone among the nation-states of the world, lacks any right to exist. That ancient Soviet propaganda is now progressive doctrine. Filtered through French academia and twisted by America’s obsession with race, it is also rapidly infecting the entire Democratic party. So here’s another lesson. Sue Collins has held out so long, she may soon have company in her party’s moderate wing: Democrats who can’t go home. I wonder if the Republicans are ready for that.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.