Graham Platner Loses Washington’s Vote

And yet the era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end

Maine Democrat Graham Platner, who is running against 29-year incumbent Senator Susan Collins, is involved in another “scandal” for sexting women who aren’t his wife.

Washington Monthly editor Bill Scher declared that “Mills should get back in the race,” referring to the 78-year-old governor — favored by party leaders like Chuck Schumer — who suspended her primary campaign in April after getting her clock cleaned by Platner so badly she’s probably still shitting pieces of her dentures out.

The question on Washington’s mind now is: Why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner?

The answer is simple: That’s not what Maine voters want.

People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be. Think of the telegenic types like Gavin Newsom who never have a strand of hair out of place or much of anything to say (certainly not against the establishment). Think of Cory Booker, who at age 56 announced his first marriage, complete with a made-for-media rollout — clearly on the ridiculous assumption that people still give a shit about their presidential candidate having a typical family. Think of Pete Buttigieg, a politician so allergic to public displays of affection with his spouse that his own communications director publicly called him “the Tin Man.”

Susan Collins and Janet Mills would never be embroiled in a sexting scandal (too much integrity?)

These are people who think we’re still living in the I Love Lucy world where married couples retire to separate beds so as not to offend viewers’ delicate sensibilities.

Not only are those days long gone — they never really existed. When longtime Massachusetts congressman and liberal icon Barney Frank died on May 19 at age 86, the beltway obituaries did him one last favor by sticking to his Dodd-Frank regulatory and gay-rights legacy rather than his sex scandal in which a male escort he’d hired ran a prostitution operation out of Frank’s apartment. Outlets like CNN gave him a respectful interview on the future of the Democratic Party.

Just this year, congressman Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned after pressuring a married staffer have sex with him, leading to her suicide by immolation(!)

Some other examples off the top of my head:

• Matt Gaetz — resigned from Congress in 2024 under a House Ethics cloud, the panel later concluding there was evidence he’d paid women for sex, including a 17-year-old

• Eric Swalwell — the California Democrat resigned the same week as Gonzales, facing sexual-misconduct allegations from multiple women

• John Edwards — the married former presidential contender fathered a child with a campaign videographer, then leaned on an aide to falsify a DNA test, all while his wife was dying of cancer.

• Bill Clinton — blowjob etc.

And of course there’s personal scandals of a non-sexual nature, such as with Hegseth and Kash Patel, who are drinking themselves to (our) death.

We must not allow Platner to sully the sterling reputation of Congress

In the real world, it seems everyone and anyone can have dark present and past. Take Obama—the squeaky-cleanest of them all, the liberal patron saint of respectability and decorum. Biographer David Garrow’s Rising Star documents that before Obama ever met Michelle, he twice proposed to an earlier girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager — and kept seeing her into the early ‘90s even as his relationship with Michelle deepened.

I don’t care about any of this because I never bought his or any politician’s fairy tale story to begin with. It’s patronizing that grown adults are expected to believe such things. Voters are electing a politician, not a Pope. And they know that.

Platner will survive this — not because voters are thrilled he was sexting other women, but because they already assume half of Congress is doing the same, or worse.

And it’s not as if I’m some Platner booster. He’s always struck me as an impulsive dumbass (not unlike me I suppose, except I would never run for Congress). But I'll take a dumbass over Susan Collins, a three-decade incumbent who has rubber-stamped every war she's ever met and just about every major Washington disaster since I was in elementary school.

Consider how she answered Platner's remark that she'd voted to send him to Iraq. She said “that was Platner’s decision to serve. He was not drafted.”

That's the kind of casual cruelty that falls out of these decorum-humpers the moment an election forces them to face an actual human being. And here's the thing about everyman dumbasses like Platner: they don't talk like that. That line is pure thirty-year operator — the reflex of someone who's spent a career treating war as a line item and the people fighting them as a footnote. These people hold you in contempt and are indecent straight through. They just know which side of the plate the salad fork goes on.

And let’s be real, Platner’s story here is a pretty common one. This and his other “scandals” sound a lot like other former Marines I know. So when Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office. And to the public they are saying: Go back to the kiddie table at Thanksgiving and pick from the pre-approved smoothgroins we’ve selected for you.

— Edited by William M. Arkin