Platner pity party

It was a screed worthy of Donald Trump. Graham Platner blamed everyone but himself as he withdrew as the Democratic Senate nominee from Maine.

There is no dispute there are many guilty parties in the implosion of the 41-year-old oyster farmer’s candidacy: A Democratic Party “brain trust” that failed to heed the lessons of 2024 and opted to back the state’s 78-year-old woman governor.

And progressives who failed to properly vet a man who admitted to having gone through “a very dark period,” then failed again to read the ample signposts along the way in a rush to oust incumbent Senator Susan Collins.

But rather than accepting any responsibility for any accusations of sexual assaults — including the most recent one that surfaced this week after he had declared there were no more skeletons in his closet, Platner sent fingers of blame pointing in multiple directions:

In an 11-plus minute video he insisted:

“I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations. We’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power. I just want to make it clear this is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen. It’s not real.”

Trying to stay true to the rebel image he cultivated in his rise to win the June primary, he took aim at the Democratic Party apparatus that backed Governor Janet Mills and now declared it would withdraw all funding:

“It’s the fact that [the allegations] are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us,” Platner said, running emotional at times. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish, that if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.”

And in proclaiming he was the victim, he used the familiar Trump tactic: blame the media.

“I learned about this through press inquiries, with no time to truly respond, no time for investigations before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and execution[er]. Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of things, not the end.”

Platner’s refusal to accept any blame doesn’t mean his complaints were totally without merit. As the New York Times reports, he was recruited by a trio of progressive organizers, including a New York political operative who had successfully advised New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s unlikely victory last fall.

That followed the decision by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to push the term-limited Mills into what the party saw as its best chance to oust the five-term incumbent Collins.

Not all of the “political establishment” was against him either. He won the backing of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and California Representative Ro Khanna.

But the Platner team — and the candidate himself — failed miserably at vetting his self-admitted struggles.

”Platner’s campaign said that a research firm produced a vetting memo of nearly 50 pages that included searches of news reports, social media posts and public documents. They did not do exhaustive interviews with Platner.”

That left it to the “corporate media,” which did the job with help from Republican opposition researchers — one of whom was a former Platner girlfriend. A relationship that gave the Platner team the opportunity to avoid a head-on collision a month ago.

But corporate media doesn’t come out smelling like a rose in its political reporting this year — when it comes to prominent Republicans like Trump, New Jersey Representative Tom Kean Jr. and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

Or dealing with the ongoing question of why would a woman lie about a humiliating personal experience for political gain.

Not to mention reverting to the ever-popular “Dems in disarray” narrative.

While the Platner debacle clearly is a major setback in plans to unseat Collins and win a Senate majority, it also allows reporters to indulge their preference to focus on sex scandals rather than addled elders like the man who claimed the Islamic Republic of Japan fired on ships in the Strait of Hormuz and confused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Maybe that’s why the only person who seems to have sympathy for Platner today is that very same man now trying to welsh on a court-ordered $5 million judgment after being found civilly liable for sexual assault and defamation:

“It’s really a question of whether or not you believe the woman. A lot of people say big falsehoods,’” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.”