Barack Obama’s campaign manager gushed over oysterman Graham Platner’s victory speech Tuesday in the Maine Democratic Senate primary, even as the candidate faces multiple scandals.
“You’re seeing a star is born, and you’re seeing how a guy who no one had heard of a year ago, even in Maine, no one had heard of him, just beat the incumbent governor in a primary, and so I thought it was amazing,” Jim Messina told MS NOW’s Jen Psaki.
Platner will face off against GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November after defeating Gov. Janet Mills and professor David Costello.
The progressive Democrat is facing backlash on multiple fronts, including a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, old Reddit posts about sexual assault in the military and allegations of sexting women while married to his current wife.
A recent New York Times report also shed light on what some described as Platner’s “unsettling behavior” in the past, including one woman, a Virginia conservative, who described him as abusive.
Platner responded to the allegations, stating that he “was a far from perfect boyfriend” to those women and was in “a dark place.” He later added that his voters would stand by him.
“I’m still far from perfect, but every day I wake up and try to be a little better, a little kinder, than I was the day before,” Platner said following his victory Tuesday night. “If you give me a chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.”
Messina told Psaki that Platner’s speech was “a master class.”
“I don’t know if he wrote that or who wrote that, but that was, Jen, really good,” Messina said.
He went on to call it “perfect political theater” when Platner told his supporters, “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics and our country, then you must also believe that people can change. The reason I believe that is because I have lived it.”
“Now the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by,” Platner said. “But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us.”
Messina, awed by Platner’s speech, drew similarities between the Democratic candidate and Obama’s 2008 campaign.
“There’s nothing that people get more mad about a broken political system, and they realize the deck is stacked against them, and they realize why the deck is stacked, because of money,” Messina said. “And so that line, I thought was a brilliant political move, and I think it’s a guy who understood the moment he was in.”