How do we make sense of the extraordinary rise and sudden collapse of Graham Platner? Times Opinion has featured a variety of voices wrestling with blame and lessons. That included acknowledging the earlier attraction of Platner’s campaign. As Alex Seitz-Wald, the deputy editor at the Maine newspaper Midcoast Villager, said in a written conversation with Michelle Goldberg and Matthew Yglesias, “The reality was that the enthusiasm for Platner was real, organic and pervasive in Maine.” People found him, as Goldberg put it in a column, “incredibly charming and charismatic.” But now that it’s all over, it’s natural to assign blame, and as Goldberg put it, “There is plenty of blame to go around.” Targets included Platner himself; Chuck Schumer, for his intervention on behalf of getting an apparently halfhearted candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, into the race; Platner’s campaign, and its incompetent vetting; and much else. Above all, what can we learn? “If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear,” suggested Goldberg. The Times editorial board asked more of the Democratic Party: What it owes voters, it said, “is not another savior but a set of answers — plain, specific, sometimes divisive answers to the questions constituents are asking to improve their lives.” Bret Stephens, in The Conversation with Frank Bruni, hit a more succinct note, referring to Platner and the evidence of character flaws: “When you see lightning, you will soon hear thunder.” Maine Democrats will not have much time to reflect. As Seitz-Wald noted, they have “two and a half weeks for this lightning pseudo-primary.”
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