The NY Times' Obsession with Platner's "Working Class" Cred

Graham Platner & his $60,000 a year fortune. Must be nice.

A key part of U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s appeal is his authenticity – he’s a normal working dude making his living on the coast of Maine. He’s married to a teacher who is still paying off her student loan debt and their income consists of what they make from their business and what basically amounts to a VA pension for all of the injuries he sustained serving combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. About $60,000 a year between the two of them. Must be nice! If elected, he would certainly be one of the poorest members of the Senate.

Platner is also an excellent communicator and has captivated audiences by telling it like it is — that our country is run by fascist oligarchs and the people need to take back the power from the “Epstein Class” to ensure everyone is able to live dignified lives. His positions on taxing the rich and Medicare for All are very popular, so his opponents’ focus isn’t on his policies. That’s why establishment Democrats, pro-Israel liberals and Republicans have focused on personal attacks and challenging his authenticity.

Collins’ campaign strategy is to portray Platner as a spoiled rich kid who pissed away his privilege and never did anything with his life. Because yeah, serving four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t count, apparently. They want to portray him as an “actor,” who is fabricating his past to seem like an “every man.”

The National Republican Senate Committee released an ad in April that spoofed a Platner ad about his background by calling him “a prep-school kid living in a house daddy bought him.” Yes, his dad loaned him the money to purchase his modest $200,000 house, which he is paying back with his VA benefits. Scandalous.

This is similar to how the Collins campaign went after her Democratic opponent Sara Gideon in 2020. Gideon was characterized by the Collins campaign as a rich private school girl from Rhode Island who played polo, lived in a mansion and wore a fancy Patagonia jacket. But Gideon actually is a millionaire and Platner definitely is not, despite the media’s obsession with the fancy chair his grandfather designed. As I wrote in earlier posts like this one and this one, Susan Collins has shown a cunning ability to somehow put herself above the fray while having sympathetic media do her dirty work.

On Friday, The NY Times came out with a hit piece on Platner titled “Oysterman, Veteran, Prep-School Alum: A Senate Candidate’s Complex Class Story” challenging Platner’s statement, “I’ve never been close to money and power.” The story attempted to pick apart Platner’s working-class persona by portraying him as a privileged kid from a wealthy family. Much of it we already knew – yes, Graham’s grandfather was a well-known architect who designed a fancy chair. Graham went to a fancy prep-school for a semester, for which he received financial aid, and then dropped out because he couldn’t relate to all the rich kids who had never worked a day in their lives. Like many kids who grew up on the coast of Maine, Platner raked blueberries and worked in restaurants. The story also quoted Tony Buxton, a corporate lobbyist with the Portland firm Preti Flaherty, accusing Platner of lying about his business. But for some reason it didn’t mention what Buxton does for work. The Times simply described him as “a former chairman of the Maine Democratic Party who had supported Ms. Mills.”

“This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence,” Buxton told the NY Times. “If he’s an oysterman, I’m a florist, OK? Because I raise roses and give them to my wife.”

Ok, first off, Platner does actually run an actual oyster business called Waukeag Neck Oyster Co., contrary to the constant right-wing smears claiming it doesn’t exist. I’ve eaten his oysters at an event he catered once. The Times also failed to mention that Buxton represents the company seeking to build a controversial data center in Sanford and successfully lobbied to get Governor Mills to veto a data center moratorium last month. He also donated over $2,000 to Mills’ Senate campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records.

In its extensive investigation into whether Platner is “working class” or not, the Times concluded that his status “defies easy categorization, complicating the blue-collar image cultivated by Mr. Platner and his campaign.” Among the “damning” revelations in the Times piece were that his “Cornell-educated” grandfather “designed an expansive family estate in Connecticut” and that Graham attended a “private school” — John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. As the Times reported, John Baptst “was known in the area as a prep school favored by families who wanted their children to get into more competitive universities, a place where freshmen took school trips to London or Paris, according to a yearbook.”

I love how John Bapst has become this super elite, fancy pants, Dead Poets Society prep school in the mind palaces of national reporters. Nowhere in the article does it mention that Maine has a “school choice” program that allows local students from surrounding towns to use their public education funds to attend private academies and schools like John Bapst. They don’t have to pay out-of-pocket tuition directly to the school. As Platner has explained, his local high school had accreditation problems his freshman year, so his parents sent him to Hotchkiss for a semester and then John Bapst. Another detail in the story was that Platner starred as Henry Higgins in the school’s senior-year production of “My Fair Lady.” I can’t count how many times I’ve read media stories about Graham being a great actor in high school, playing into the right-wing narrative that he is “just acting.”

And not only did Platner’s “Dartmouth-educated” father loan him the money to buy his house, he also helped finance Graham and his wife Amy’s trip to Norway for IVF treatments. The thrust of the story was that Graham is financially dependent on his parents because they have helped him financially and his mother’s “upscale restaurant” is “his oyster farm’s biggest customer.”

“His parents have offered him privileges and connections and have helped him financially,” the Times reported.

So apparently, Graham is this privileged rich kid, but he needs help paying for health care and housing. How is that not relatable? I’ve been to a number of Platner’s town halls and one of the most common themes are older Mainers talking about the lack of economic opportunities for their adult children and grandchildren. Many of these young people are still living at home, even though they have jobs, because they can’t afford to rent or buy a home in Maine. Many of them struggle without affordable health care and child care to allow them to work. At a recent town hall in Appleton, a local teacher told Platner that she had been teaching for 30 years in the area and still had $100,000 in student loan debt that kept compounding interest.

Working in the labor movement, I’ve often heard accusations that someone “isn’t working class” because they have this or that advanced degree or don’t work in traditional, blue-collar industries like mining, logging or fishing. I know union adjunct professors with PhDs who are barely scraping by and Elevator Constructors earning $150,000 a year without a college degree. As far as I’m concerned, they are both working class. They work for a living and earn their income from wages. Some of the nastiest comments we receive on the Maine AFL-CIO’s Facebook page are from people reacting to nonprofit and food service workers, many of them female or LGBTQ+, forming unions. There’s a commonly held, sexist belief that these workers don’t deserve unions because they’re not doing “real work.”

Recently, a Trump supporting pot grower derided me as a member of the “laptop class,” implying that I have a made up job because I do my work on a computer and don’t work with my hands. This is whole maddening debate is just another way to divide working-class people so we’re fighting each other and not the oligarchs. In an interview with the Times, Platner scoffed at smears regarding his background.

“I work with my hands on the ocean and I don’t make much money,” he said. “I’m not really sure what else the definition is than working, making money from working, not being rich.”

In an interview with journalist David Sirota, Platner expressed frustration with the Times for fixating on whether he was “working class,” especially given that the media hasn’t applied this scrutiny to Mills or Collins, both of whom come from powerful and connected political families. So Graham is an oligarch because his dad loaned him the money to purchase his $200,000 home, while Collins is worth millions of dollars, in part due to her DC lobbyist husband Tom Daffron’s fortune. Daffron’s firm reportedly received more than $60 million in government contracts between 2006 and 2016 while his wife served in her powerful position in the Senate. Somehow Platner getting help putting a roof over his head is the pinnacle of privilege while Collins grew up in generational wealth. Her family’s sixth generation business S.W. Collins has multiple locations across Maine, including stores in Caribou, Presque Isle, Houlton, Lincoln and Fort Kent.

“Yeah, my grandfather was a successful architect, but I grew up in Sullivan, Maine and my mom is still working because she has no money,” Platner told Sirota. “And we’re trying to figure out, quite frankly, if she can’t sell her restaurant, she’s got no retirement.”

So how does Platner define “working class?” “For me, he said, “it’s essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth. If you start a business and you get successful, but you still have to go in every day to work your ass off, I’m sorry, you fucking work for a living.”

I think that’s a good enough way to define it. People who work for a living versus people living off passive income and doing nothing to earn it. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article delving into Collins’ wealth and privilege that got her a seat in the US Senate with no electoral experience. While Platner is talking about really concrete solutions to improve the material conditions of working-class people, Collins has spent her career doling out corporate welfare and tax cuts for the super rich. I don’t care if the candidate is as rich as Elon Musk as long as they support a more equitable distribution of wealth in this country.

As Sirota noted, the Times’ decision to run the hit piece serves as a reminder that there is “no such thing as ‘objectivity’’ because a news outlet’s story selection is a sign of its subjective viewpoint and its goals.” He continued:

“Of course, all candidates deserve scrutiny — but the point here is that what corporate news outlets decide to cover and not cover is a subjective and often ideological decision, even if they then write the stories in the language of objectivity. Everyone should stop pretending ‘objectivity’ is a thing. It’s not. Fairness and accuracy is — but the moment decisions are made that something is news (say, Platner’s modest house) and something isn’t news (say, Collins’ massive wealth), there is inherently no objectivity. It would be better for outlets just to be more honest and admit what their goals, values and viewpoints really are.”

A-fucking-men.

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