In the Quest for Control of the Senate, Maine Is A Battlefield

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The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is concerned about the GOP losing control of the U.S. Senate in the upcoming midterm election. You can see this concern plainly in the commercials that the mainstream group with fringe views makes and runs.

Here’s one that attacks Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine. NRSC is particularly concerned about Platner—they’ve aired half a dozen new Susan Collins ads in the past few months.

“Susan Collins doesn’t have a Nazi tattoo.” They’re serious, but this is comedy nevertheless.

What does Susan Collins have stuck to her like a tattoo? Oh, let’s see…decades of support for institutional corruption and unchecked imperialism. Her mistakes are deadly, whereas Platner’s are merely dumb.

In this next attack ad from NRSC, they remake a Platner ad (also posted below) and continue to disparage his background. The idea they’re forwarding—that Platner’s an elitist, not a common oysterman—might be true, but it definitely doesn’t disqualify him from being a Senator. He went to Hotchkiss? Check. He is a gentleman farmer? Check. This makes him Senate material, and is, in a weird and unintended way, a gift to Platner from the GOP.

Here’s the original animated video from Platner’s campaign.

The race in Maine is getting lots of press attention right now. The Wall Street Journal points out that Platner didn’t arrive on the scene on his own. He was handpicked by a group of independent activists—Daniel Moraff, Leanne Fan, and Morris Katz. Katz is a partner at Fight Agency in Philadelphia.

Moraff is a recent graduate of Yale Law School. He said about Platner’s campaign and its emphasis on authenticity, “There’s this whole world of people who’ve built careers out of the Democratic Party and its ecosystem, and who put out the kind of campaigns where a normal person can look at it and say, ‘This looks and sounds like shit.’”

Katz was recently featured in The New York Times. “In seeking to rebrand the (Democratic) party, Katz professes an aversion to phonies so strong it would make Holden Caulfield blush,” the newspaper said. Which explains the following F-bomb-laden video from Platner. It’s how people talk. Why leave it on the editing floor?

Platner is complicated. He talks like a regular guy and makes regular guy mistakes, but he also says he needs to “commune with the bivalves,” in the video above. That’s good. We need more people who have read Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau in the U.S. Senate. People who won’t waste a soldier’s life on political theatrics. People who will protect our natural resources from the ravages of extractive industries. People who will make sure that we can all read Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau (and any other texts that we may desire).