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Keith Stover is a freelance writer and musician from coastal Maine.
I believe the locals here in Maine get it. The nationals don’t. We call this “irony.” The suits and technocrats who send their daily arrows into the wars of their own making don’t understand.
Mainers are humble, hard-working folk. Humble, because the four distinct seasons each bring their own unpredictable challenges. Hard working because if they were ever to take a week off, they might not make a car payment, a mortgage payment, pay an electric bill. Many can’t afford to go to a doctor and they’re already worried about the price of heating fuel come next fall.
Once upon a time, Washington, D.C. was figuratively 20,000 miles from Augusta. Now it’s on our computers and TVs and cell phones 24/7. It’s in our head and in our pockets.
The Trumpian culture wars are in their tenth year, the four or five small Maine cities having essentially become blue sanctuaries, their citizens coalesced around the rights and values they once took for granted, the rural counties rife with MAGA flags, Clinton, Obama and Biden haters and Second Amendment die-hards. With such stark division, talk radio — with its incessant internecine argument — was tailor-made for a place like Maine.
I see virtually no middle ground. All sides are filled with the distrust and grievance that come from economic hardship and the instability of a society suddenly fractured by autonomous technology. On social media, we fight to retain some semblance of our humanity, but there’s a growing fear that the more things change, the more they change forever.
Along comes Graham Platner, boom-voiced and bearded, the tang of the salt-flats still clinging to his flannel shirt. He’s an oyster farmer. He had a tattoo. He says he didn’t know what it meant. He has PTSD from four combat tours defending the country he once loved then hated and now is trying to love again. He went to a private school. He is happily married, but sexted half a dozen women on the side. That’s between him and his wife. Until the New York Times and NBC, CBS and ABC get involved.
Everyone should know by now, Platner is not some patrician, Goethe-ian model of political purity, designed like a circuit board to send the energy of the higher-ups down to the digital network of nervous Nellies, incessantly weighing their chances of victory with every meme and post. No, I believe he is more like the opposite — the prototype that was quickly discarded before it ever made it into mass production. Too many bugs. Too many quirks. Too unpredictable. Too dangerous to plug into the operating system.
But the nationals just don’t get it. Mainers are numb to scandal. President Donald Trump long ago inured us all to human foibles, suspect judgment and bad decisions. We’re way beyond the skeleton closets they’ve all tried to nail shut. Yes, Platner is flawed. Yes he is controversial. But what he is not is some radical revolutionary. Yes he has an unsavory history, but it’s also obvious to me that he is authentic, intelligent, and ambitious, a candidate running on a working-class platform with the fire to back up his promises. Blessed by no less than Bernie Sanders, Platner has vowed to take on the billionaire class, defend democracy and the U.S. Constitution and rebuild the failed national healthcare system. In this shrill age of partisan hyperbole, this may seem radical to some, but I believe most Americans know that without these changes, the backbone of this country will inevitably be broken.
On his podcast interview, Jon Stewart praised Graham’s candidness as refreshing, contrasting his plain-spoken, common-sense vision for average middle-class Mainers with the polish and posturing that define all career politicians. No, Platner is not polished, but I think he is a bona fide threat to not only defeat Sen. Susan Collins in the fall, but to launch a national grassroots movement that has already resonated from Bangor to Washington.