A Fellow Veteran Assesses Graham Platner’s Campaign

Graham Platner is the Anti-Vance, the Anti-Hegseth, an antidote to the warrior wet dreams polluting the minds of young soldiers – whatever their race or pronoun – and perhaps untold numbers of young men generally.  There’s been some chat in the old guard about what a GI Resistance Movement might look like fashioned to contemporary conditions.  If Trump decides to ignore posse comitatus and deploy active American troops in US cities, he may himself set the stage for soldier refusals to treat their fellow citizens as enemy combatants.  If this scenario plays out, I predict that the voice of Graham Platner will echo widely in the resistance.

Hard to imagine that anyone who follows American politics hasn’t by now heard of Graham Platner, whose story and image flood the media and the internet.  In mid-August, abetted by Mamdani’s crowd in New York, Platner launched his campaign in Maine to contest Susan Collins’ seat in the US Senate.  The Marine Corps veteran and oyster farmer and his team have since conducted an exhausting string of Town Hall meetings covering Maine from top to bottom.  Anecdotally, one hears that Susan Collins hasn’t conducted a Town Hall since Clinton was in the White House.

Several nights ago, my wife Susan and I attended one of Planter’s recent Town Hall, scheduled from 6-7 pm in our nearby shire town.  We arrived an hour early, and the elementary school parking lot was already full.  Inside, the crowd that would eventually fill the auditorium was well on the way to the fire marshal’s limit – 700 folks, we were told.  In recent weeks, Platner’s campaign has been roiled in controversy.  In the room, there was an atmosphere of expectation around how he would answer a pile up of despicable idiocies (about which more below) he’d once posted on Reddit that were dug up by CNN and led his political director to resign, citing “words or values I  can [not] stand behind in a candidate for the United States Senate.”  The revelation occurred, by coincidence or design, on or near the day Maine Governor Janet Mills, 77, jumped in the Senate race against Collins.  Suddenly, it looked like curtains for the Platner campaign, until a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll several days after the bad news surfaced showed that Platner’s numbers had actually risen and that now “58 percent of likely Democratic primary voters [in Maine] support Platner, compared with 24 percent for Gov. Janet Mills.  Fourteen percent said they were undecided.”  The UNH Survey reported that “the poll came before Platner’s acknowledgement this week that a skull-and-crossbones tattoo he got in his 20s was once used as a Nazi symbol. He has since covered it with a new tattoo, saying he was unaware of the image’s origins when he got it during a drunken binge with his Marine buddies on leave in Croatia in 2007 – an even worse look if you know your WWII history.  The former political director, who resigned, challenged his claim of innocence.  The campaign responded that the allegation was ‘a lie from a disgruntled former employee,” this reported by opinion columnist Tressie McMillan-Cottom in the New York Times (Oct. 29, 2025).  I’ll have to call that a draw for the time being.

Flash: According to Michelle Goldberg, also writing in the Times (10/31/25), reporting from the same Town Hall we were at – the polls have caught up to Platner’s miscues and the state’s frightened establishment Democrats have appeared to rally, but the margin is still very close.  My gut tells me, as someone who’s observed Maine politics for almost five decades, that this picture is closer to reality than the New Hampshire survey.

A fellow veteran with whom I have long been active in antiwar politics and who served 18 months in Vietnam as a Marine infantryman, glossed the controversy this way: dumb-ass Jar-head Down East Mainer finely grew up and should have had the fucking tattoo taken off before he jumped into the race and the jackals found out about it.  NOW he can tell them,  “Fuck-off already!  It’s gone!  I’m running for the Senate. What is your question about policy?  I hope they never look into my own two Medals of Honor.”  Anyway, that’s where things stood while we waited for Platner to take the stage.  Dispatch to follow.

But first, I have to double back to McMillan-Cottom’s Times opinion piece, “A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness.”  Google it.  Her language disparaging Platner is gratuitous throughout. Sampler: “His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye.  He’s often styled [I think she means dressed] in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt, implying a sort of everyman machismo.”  Really?  I guess she’s more disco than grunge.  In fact, the average guy I know in Maine styles to one degree or another in a similar manner.  I do.  And like her, I’ve got a PhD and have done my time in academia.

Describing Platner as the Democratic Party’s latest “great white hope, she accuses him of exploiting “a white working class aesthetic… used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns.”  He’s pandering, she says, to the white working class.  In pursuit of these theses, she plays the race card, the woke card, whereas her sociological setting is strictly South-centric.  Moreover, she “knows a lot about poor white people who rely on SNAP benefits for their meals and emergency rooms for their health care,” (Yeah, and some of my best friends are black… gimme a break).    A

bout Maine, Tressie McMillan-Cottom doesn’t know shit from shinola. Fact #1: Last time I looked at the national census, Maine was described as over 97% white.  Keep in mind this campaign is taking place in Maine, not Alabama.  I’m happy to note – call me a sentimental old New York radical – that more and more African Americans seem to be trickling into the state; but our largest concentration of black folks is a refugee community of Somalis – Africans, not African Americans.  McMillan-Cottom allows that “some polling suggests that young voters still support Platner.” Fact #2: Maine has the oldest population in the U.S.  The median age is approaching the mid-40s..  “This is the difference between a parent with children in middle school and an empty nester,” our former County Planner reported.  “The statewide strategy to compensate for shrinkage of local tax bases needed to support schools and services for dependent seniors,” he calculated, “is most concretely articulated in the plan to attract, not the child-bearing young, but more retirees. The idea is premised on the principle of ‘importation of wealth,’ and that the economic value of each ‘retiree is the equivalent of 3.7 factory jobs.”

So Maine is, without a doubt, Upstairs/Downstairs and it is those on the lower economic rungs, not among the well-heeled carriage trade, that Platner’s Bernie-scripted program would primarily benefit.  Families, in fact, who depend on SNAP script and the ER for serious illness or traumatic injury.  I observed while the folks were coming in and later in a photo of the audience that most of those who attended our Town Hall were seniors who occupy the middle and upper rungs, have decent health care that for some, I’m sure, they can barely afford.  And yet, despite their relative privilege, represent a strong component among Platner’s backers.  It would not surprise me if many had, even honored, working-class roots buried a generation or two back.  But the composition of this audience made me reflect on where in my community you would see a genuine cross-section of the population, and the obvious answer is the supermarket.  This crowd didn’t look like that.  And considering that one objective of Platner’s campaigns is to win the votes of alienated white working-class men who probably voted for Trump, votes that Janet Mills can’t hope to attract, they weren’t present at the Town Hall either.

When Platner finally took the podium he was light years from a living facsimile of Popeye.  The associations that flipped through my mind were infinitely more naturalistic: two tragic American male icons, Jack London and Jack Kerouac.  I’m not conjuring tragedy here, but I suppose my imaginative leap simply recognized his affinity with familiar models of the rugged individualist our culture celebrates ad finitum.  Platner seemed to step from central casting, a handsome and fit 41-year-old American white guy, more gridiron than hoops.  We would soon discover that he is also very well spoken, and could effortlessly hold the attention of the audience from whom, once settled, nary a stir was heard all evening.

But what really chilled my shit detector was his composure and the absolute absence of rhetorical flights in his speech, nor dramatic gestures in his movements.  His total absence of affect.  He’s typically described as a “straight talker,” not someone trying to convince you of or sell you something.  And unless he belongs up there with Brando, it was the person who occupies Platner who occupied the stage.   Platnertook on the Reddit comments (you can Google them too) and the tattoo directly, saying he was ashamed of what he had said, while still – credibly to my biased ears – claiming ignorance about the tattoo, stressing in the same even tone that he is not ashamed of  “who I am and my politics today.”  Perhaps the most manipulative omission in McMillen-Cottom’s opinion screed is implied in the sentence where she describes Platner as “a former defense contractor,” but astoundingly neglects to mention the main context that I believe shaped the erratic and antisocial behavior for which she scolds him so severely, the decade he spent in the Marine Corps, which included four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Separating himself from the Corps after being “intrinsically defined by the U.S. war machine” during his entire 20s, Platner’s readjustment saga traveled a very slippery slope propelled by rage of an octane I have seen most commonly in returned war veterans, a constituency I worked with for a dozen years after I myself returned from Vietnam mad as hell.

When Platner told us he’d been exposed to “violence of a scale I was not prepared for,” I had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.  Maybe he made that detour as a security contractor in Afghanistan, floundering dysfunctionally in civilian life after leaving the Corps, because it was the trade he knew best and could make a living at.  But that gig proved the final straw.  It was status quo for the brass with their satrap bennies while the slaughter of the innocents continued without pause outside the wire.  He’d finally put it together. “Nobody,” he said at the Town Hall, “can explain why those endless wars were good for Americans.  They were bad for those who had to fight, and bad for those who had to pay.”

After Afghanistan, Graham Platner finally came home to Sullivan, a small community on Maine’s midcoast, and joined an old buddy to farm oysters.  But it was the VA that really rescued him, not only treating his combat PTSD and providing comprehensive health care, but helping him get back on his feet financially.  This is another thing Platner and I have in common, and today we both understand what it feels like to have the equivalent of universal health care, and we both wonder why you can only get it if you’ve been to war?  Oh, and it’s at the VA facilities by the way where you’ll find the least diverse group gathering in the state.

One major knock against Platner’s candidacy is that he has no experience in political office.  Overlooked, as he points out, is that, after a training program provided by cadres in Maine’s organized labor circles, Platner put these new skills to use in his own community as local harbor master and as a member of the town’s planning board.  At the base here in Maine, these are extremely responsible positions.

When Platner got around to mapping his politics, it went something like this:

The health care system is falling apart.  People my age can’t buy homes.  Everybody knows in their bones that they’re being screwed and that we’re supposed to blame people like us. We should be pointing the finger up.  We live in a system functioning how it was intended to function, where we’re witnessing the largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in our history.

Platner’s program, as I’ve indicated, is point by point from the progressive playbook. Remove the cap on Social Security; codify pro-choice; protect the right of people to live in their body as they see fit; fund schools and child care; fund hospitals (“not bombs in Gaza,” as he put it); make it illegal for hedge funds to buy up housing; claw back war powers from the Executive; tax the billionaires and gut the military budget.  If I’m leaving out your favorite plank, I’m sure it’s in there and was probably mentioned.

As I rush to file this before what I’m reporting becomes hopelessly dated, I can’t keep up with the mounting waves of attacks on Platner’s campaign.  It’s a feeding frenzy in the media.  Other high-placed staff are bailing, rentals from the political class; they come and go tacking to the poll numbers against the risk to their own professional careers and standing.  Who needs ‘em?  For now, the core of the movement appears solid, with enough volunteers to man the pumps and keep the campaign afloat.  Bottom line: Graham Platner has no intention of being driven off the field.  “I have no right to give up,” he said with a nod to those who opposed Vietnam and are still in the struggle. He urged his supporters “to show up, meet people where they’re at (sound familiar?), don’t give ground, find common ground. The campaign’s not in trouble.  It’s just getting started.”

I don’t really expect he’ll get the nomination, but I don’t think he’s going away.

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