Last month I ran a post about Maine Senatorial candidate Gerald Platner and the men who defended his Nazi tattoo and his adultery — don’t Democrats realize that real people are flawed and messy? Rejecting him is just “HR lady politics” according to Matt Stoller. Another pundit, Ken Klippenstein, suggested it’s better to have someone flesh and blood and manly rather than “real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”
Turns out Stoller and Klippenstein should have listened to the HR ladies: a woman who used to date him says he raped her. The woman, Jenny Racicot, provided evidence too: “emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner.” Some discussion here. Apparently the Maine Dems can swap out another candidate if Platner steps down from the race quickly enough. Sounds like he might do it. If he’s genuinely committed to opposing the Toddler and fascism, he should, whether or not we can win with Candidate B.
I’d like to say something deep about this. I got nothing. It’s frustrating to think control of the Senate, and thereby appointments to SCOTUS, might hinge on this mess. However dumping a rapist is absolutely the right and necessary choice.
Racicot says she waited because she supports his politics, just not him. As journalist Marisa Kabas says, “this dynamic described by jenny racicot is, as i understand it, very common among progressive women in maine. they’ve been put in an impossible position and feel like they’re tanking platner’s campaign when in reality he did that on his own by being a violent and reckless person.” As Elizabeth Wrigley-Field puts it “One of my hardest-won political lessons is that it’s never, ever worth it to treat ppl as ~indispensable no matter what they do~ —bc we see the contributions & potential of the abusive men & we don’t get to see that in the women they drive out. We never actually get to know what we’ve squandered”
