Rick Perlstein has a really insightful post about the role of veterans in rural communities, and why rural communities might be inclined to much better understand the oysterman’s foibles than, say, the DC press. I’m not going to excerpt it, because it’s worth reading the whole thing (no paywall). Perlstein begins with reminding the reader about the DC establishment’s reaction to Clinton’s infidelity, and then transitioning to the way that the rural Illinois area where he lives treats vets.
I’m guessing both Kay and Joe have seen the same phenomenon, but the rural community where I grew up is very similar to the ones Perlstein describes in his post. We know and love our veterans. When I visit my mom’s grave, a grave nearby holds the remains of the young man who died playing Russian roulette after he came back from Vietnam. Everyone in town knows his story. One of my wife’s uncles, perhaps the nicest of all eight, would need psychiatric care every so often because of the PTSD he got after a tour in Vietnam. He died younger than he should have of a terrible lung illness caused by exposure to Agent Orange. More recently, the National Guard unit in town had to deploy to Iraq, and the town paper was full of stories about them.
This is not just a rural Dakota phenomenon. In the Southern Tier of rural New York, near where I lived in Rochester, most little towns have some kind of war memorial. During the Iraq War, they would hang pictures of the young men and women who were serving on the light poles, similar to the way that small towns hang pictures of high school graduates on those poles today.
So do veterans get some slack from ordinary voters? Absolutely, and it’s probably helping Platner.
I want to focus on something else — the way the Democratic Party contains a bunch of apparently free agents who feel that it’s their God-given right to shit on our candidates to make them look better. Steve M had a post about this yesterday:
But for observers of American politics, Democratic self-hatred is, in the David Foster Wallace sense, the water we swim in and don't even notice. We think it's normal that Democrats routinely attack their own party ("Weak!" "Woke!") and are afraid to say categorically that their own party is better than the opposition party. We think it's normal that Democrats echo Republican framing of Democrats. We think circular firing squads like the one in Maine are normal.
You know who's not organizing a circular firing squad right now, in response to the voters' choice of a flawed Senate nominee? The Republican Party. Graham Platner damaged his marriage, but it's still intact. Ken Paxton of Texas broke up his marriage with multiple adulteries, and is a sleazebag in many other ways -- he was once impeached, though not convicted, in a Republican-controlled Texas legislature.
In that post, he pointed out how Cory Booker had to comment on Platner’s infidelity, and also how an unnamed Democratic consultant called Platner an “albatross” and predicted that “he’s going to lose.”
Well, maybe, but we’re a few months from the election. Perhaps the option of shutting the fuck up could be taken by some of these people. Platner might not be an ideal candidate, but he’d be a hell of a lot better than Susan Collins in the Senate.
Two observations:
This is yet another proxy war between the consultants who advise the centrists and the “rogue” consultants. I’m not going to say that the “rogue” consultants — the ones associated with the Bernie wing of the party — are any better than the entrenched DC consultants. But if we had this fight out in the open, it would certainly be better for the party base.
The general acceptance of a lack of party cohesiveness, plus a press culture that rewards elected Dems for shitting on other Dems, is toxic. It’s easy karma (in their view) for someone like Booker to disassociate themselves with Platner. I think that’s a weak, shitty move. Just evade and shut up, like you do for all the other hard questions you’re asked. Plus, Booker is a guy who got married at 55. I’m guessing there might be a skeleton or two in his closet. Is he so sure that he wants the same treatment he gave Platner?
I’m not normally a big Ken Klippenstein fan, but his post on this topic is also worth a read.
In closing, we’ve got a couple of choices. One is to sit and engage in weeks of mourning over the flaws of our party’s candidate. The other is to fight:
If Collins wants to roll around in the mud, she should realize that everyone gets dirty in a mudfight.
