Is Graham Platner's Top Aide Serious With This Tweet?
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Somebody on Platner's team apparently thought a tweet could do the work a real statement should have done. Suspend the campaign, they said, like that phrase alone would make the rape allegation against their candidate disappear into the news cycle. It didn't.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
<![CDATA[This cannot be real: Graham Platner’s camp’s initial move in the wake of Jenny Racicot’s rape allegations against him was to suspend his campaign? Something seems odd because that doesn’t appear to be true.
First, Racicot was mentioned in the watered-down New York Times piece that deliberately avoided the most serious allegations against Graham Platner, the dumpster fire of a candidate from Maine whom Democrats thought could beat Susan Collins.]]>
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Somebody on Platner's team apparently thought a tweet could do the work a real statement should have done. Suspend the campaign, they said, like that phrase alone would make the rape allegation against their candidate disappear into the news cycle. It didn't. Within hours people were asking the obvious question: suspended from what, exactly, and since when does a campaign go dark instead of answering the actual charge?
The stranger part is how this connects to the New York Times piece that mentioned Jenny Racicot almost in passing, tucked into a story that seemed engineered to avoid the ugliest allegations against Platner altogether. Democrats in Maine were excited about this guy. He was supposed to be the guy who could finally knock off Susan Collins. Instead they've got a candidate whose own campaign can't manage a coherent response to a rape allegation, and a paper of record that buried the lede on its own reporting.
None of this is complicated. If the allegation is false, say so and explain why. If it's true, or even seriously credible, the campaign should be over, not "suspended" like a parking violation. Vague tweets and softened journalism don't protect anyone. They just tell voters that nobody involved wants them to actually understand what happened here.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.