One of the greatest gifts of aging is that with each passing decade, you start to realize that the world and the people in it are a lot more complex than you initially assumed.
It often means learning that things are not nearly as straightforward and black-and-white as we assume when we are younger—that life and people are often messy and complex and that leaning into binary thinking often is limiting. When we don’t recognize that, especially in a world that now runs 24/7, we risk never doing more than scraping the surface; never getting beyond initial impressions and assumptions and rarely taking a deeper dive by fully exploring the available facts.
For weeks now, I have been trying to write this piece on U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, and each time I sat down to write, churning out a few thousand words that just didn’t feel right, I realized a few days ago that the best way to sum up my thoughts is to break this down into two or three parts—and to start by recognizing that like many of us, myself included, Graham is messy and complex but he is also earnest and sincere in his beliefs and drive to replace Susan Collins.
On the surface, Graham is a political unknown who busted on the scene in the dog days of summer back in August. He did so with his first campaign video, which portrayed him as an attractive, blue collar, working-class white man who spoke plainly and dared to use words such as “the oligarchy” to characterize our current political climate. He captured the attention of Mainers and the nation. He spoke of how hard daily survival has become for many Mainers and how we have seen housing become unaffordable in a state where home ownership used to be a given. He spoke of his time in the military and, well, he used language that spoke to people and made them feel seen. Less than 24 hours after that initial campaign video was released, the national media latched on and for weeks Graham-mania was in full effect.
My own interest in Graham started within hours of the release of the campaign video, when current and former municipal and state politicians who are friends started texting me and calling, asking if I had any thoughts on the video. A few friends who knew Graham personally suggested that given my work, they thought I should meet with him.
Four days after announcing his candidacy, Graham called me, but I missed his call and by the time we would finally connect, his campaign looked like it might be on the brink of implosion. Revelations came out in October about previous Reddit posts where Graham made comments that were deemed sexist and racist by many. Then there was tattoo-gate, when it was revealed that back in the early 2000s, while in the Marines and in Croatia, Graham had gotten what is now being viewed by many as a Nazi tattoo—a skull and crossbones image that many associated as being a Totenkopf. Graham claimed it wasn’t, though there were reports that he did know what it was. If tattoo-gate and Reddit posts weren’t enough, key campaign staffers stepped down and then there was still the question for many: Why did he do four tours in the military and later go on to work for a defense contractor Constellis, formerly known as Blackwater.
By the time our schedules aligned for a one-on-one on talk, even I was starting to wonder if he was just another slick-talking white man on some bullshit. I mean, in a brief period of time the guy had gone from being seen as the great white hope to questions of was he another John Fetterman? A white man who talks a good working-class game of being for the people but really isn’t.
By the time we initially met on Zoom, while I went in with a list of questions, in the end I asked very few of them and decided just to talk to him. I wanted to start to get a sense of who he was as a person. I wanted to get a sense of whether he was just another charismatic white guy or was he sincere and simply needing to learn. A former state legislator and friend who knew Graham had described him early on to me as “rough around the edges.” In many ways, after our initial Zoom and later by the time of our second meeting, which was in-person and involved several members of Maine’s Black community, I would see that.
In our initial meeting, the story I heard was the one that was well-known by that time, but the story that I also heard was of a man who wouldn’t truly find himself until a few years ago.
It starts with a young man who joined the Marines, somewhat gung-ho, because he was a white boy born and raised in Sullivan, Maine. A town in Downeast Maine whose current population is barely 1,200 people, almost all white—a place where American propaganda still moves its inhabitants. So, despite his own father telling him he was an idiot for enlisting, he did.
Graham most certainly isn’t the first young person without a life plan to make a questionable decision. Hell, at 18, I ran off and got married and had a baby roughly a year later. So, I understand life choices at a young age that impact you. In Graham’s case, he did his first stint in the military with the Marines, later rejoining the military but this time with the Army because of a rule change around tattoos.
As he shared his story, I saw an underlying narrative of a young man who couldn’t figure out his life path begin to emerge, and a person who might not have been sure where he fit in life. There have been conflicting opinions of whether or not he is truly working class, owning to the fact that his parents held white-collar professional jobs and his grandfather was renowned modernist architect Warren Platner.
Graham’s journey does have a working-class feel to it, though, by choosing the military despite having attended an elite secondary school in Connecticut and almost certainly having access to the resources to attend college. He chose a working-class path especially as, by his own admission that while he did attend George Washington University, he didn’t finish. To quote him, when I asked why he didn’t finish college after his time in the military, “I was a disaster of a human being and wasn’t in good shape.” A lot of this class confusion resonates with me, even though my path was almost the reverse: growing up firmly working class (poor during a few years), trying college and dropping out—then picking it up again several years later, getting two degrees and entering a middle-class life. We are both class straddlers in many ways.
Our conversation focused heavily on how it took a combination of treatment from the VA in Maine as well as community and family to get him grounded. He joined the military young and pumped up on American propaganda but left a more broken and conflicted man who still had no clear path for his life, which was why he eventually ended up doing defense work for Constellis in 2018.
According to Graham, the gig came to him via a former platoon leader, who reached out to him on Facebook to see what he was doing. At the time, he was doing nothing. He had returned to Maine in 2016 to get his life together, eventually settling in with his mom after leaving D.C., where he had been attending school and bartending but wasn’t in good shape. It was after two years of living with his mom and seeking care at the VA and realizing he needed to work when he got the opportunity to work again. Despite any misgivings, he wanted to work and frankly felt he had nothing to offer but the type of work that the military had trained him for.
While much ado has been stirred up about revelations he spent time in Kabul for Constellis, according to Graham he worked for six months as a driver, providing high-stakes defensive driving and security to the State Department. According to him, it was his time in Kabul that was the final wake-up call that regardless of the back-and-forth disillusionment he had been feeling over the years, he had indeed been fed propaganda and much of his life had been directed by that. With that realization, he felt a profound sense that he was doing nothing good there. So, despite a gig that paid $80,000 for six months of work, he decided to leave and that was the final chapter in his warrior/military life.
I have heard variations of this story over my adult life. I have been in serious relationship with men who ended up in the military for similar reasons and who left broken both physically and mentally. Disillusioned, and without a clear path. The only thing that even makes Graham’s story remarkable in any way that is that he is a white guy who didn’t grow up poor or working class and therefore had the opportunity to come home and have access to resources to rebuild his life.
There are many veterans who end up unhoused or at risk of being unhoused, or whose time in the military left them unable to return to civilian life and find their way—people who don’t get to have a redemption arc. That is where Graham’s privilege plays a role.
While much has been made of his time in the military amongst the talking heads of social media, it is naïve and ignorant to pretend as if the military hasn’t been seen as a legitimate pathway for lower-class folks and BIPOC folks—as if the military doesn’t actively recruit and target certain types of people. Which is why reducing those who serve to being simply warmongers is to ignore the military-industrial complex and how it sustains itself with a steady supply of young bodies itching for a better life, education, or simply a pathway to something. It is to ignore how American propaganda targets young people, even those who didn’t grow up struggling. I suspect that is why Graham’s father tried to dissuade him from enlisting.
The week that Graham and I met initially via Zoom was right during the nonstop coverage about the tattoo and the Reddit posts, and it was clear he was on the defensive—and probably concerned about what I might write. So much so that it was palpable through the screen and I commented on it. As he told me, being called a Nazi on CNN wasn’t a good feeling, especially because he wasn’t.
It wasn’t until the conversation moved along a bit and almost at the end of that time, in fact, that I started to see a bit of the tension in his face dissipate as I asked him why he was choosing to start a political career in the U.S. Senate and not at a local level. Then he started to light up.
He spoke of how he had gotten involved in local community efforts and eventually local organizing, and that he felt a purpose and a calling. He realized that true change in this country would require a shifting of power but also building power, and that he wanted his campaign to serve as a building block to create power. His hope was that volunteers in his campaign would go beyond being campaign volunteers and become people organizing within their communities.
We spoke initially for almost an hour, and I left the conversation with a sense of a man who was passionate about change but also wondering how long he could carry on, especially with the allegations swirling about and with some of his campaign staff jumping ship.
In no way did I get the sense that he was a racist but rather that he was a white man who acted—as many white men do—in sometimes thoughtless ways because the privilege of being a white man means you can pop off and not think again until the issue comes up. It also means the audaciousness to mount a campaign without second-guessing what you might have said or done some years earlier and not fretting over it or getting out ahead of it by addressing it before others revealed it. I say this not as a judgment but as an observation of whiteness and maleness and the privilege inherent in that dual identity.
While that initial conversation was brief, it left me hopeful to learn more about him, as many community members of color in Maine still felt that he was an extremely viable candidate, even with the tattoo and Reddit post issues. It was also clear that one conversation wasn’t going to be enough for me to really get a sense of him, though by the end of that conversation there was no denying that while he is rough around the edges, he was earnest, sincere, and brought an authenticity that is rarely seen.
As a result, this piece will be in multiple parts because we did have a subsequent meeting in person, and I have talked with several people who know him, as well as soliciting thoughts from BIPOC voters in Maine. In the end, the amount of information that I amassed is far too much for one piece, since it was coming in well over 10,000 words when I first tried to do it in one go. Part 2 will be out in a few days. Stay tuned, and hopefully I can give you a fair, balanced picture of the man which you can use to inform your own decisions and maybe reframe some preconceptions, regardless of where you decide to sit in your opinion of him.
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