god forgive me i'm gonna talk about platner

A note: This is a blogpost about the Maine politician Graham Platner, who just today dropped out of his race due to some pretty awful sexual assault allegations. I won't be discussing those in detail, but hefty CW if you need it. There's basically no angle on the Platner situation that isn't depressing. On the one hand, we have this guy who was clearly unfit for the position running a very personality-forward campaign to get himself elected, in the process creating an engine that cannot be reconciled to another candidate, and thus trapping a bunch of people into a political direction that will burn them out for no good outcome. There's also the actual sexual assault victims, for whom we now have (as so many keep putting it) 'credible evidence' of their experienced harm. I don't think there's much that I need to say about them. There's also the broader, much more frustrating part of all this: Graham Platner wasn't popular for no reason. For his faults, he was clearly resonating with a…