campaign biography candidates

A lot (probably too much) has been written about Graham Platner's faux working class credentials. Takes galore. Here's some scattered orthogonal thoughts. The whole episode is a specific example of amore general phenomenon, and that is the political presentation of self. Every politician inherently constructs a public identity and persona; this can be more or less intentional, and it can be more or less correlative with their private identity/persona, but it's always going to exist. I think that's probably more intuitive than ever for most people, given how social media forces everyone with a profile to confront the concept head-on and personally. Trying to be more working-class or more a "man of the people" has always been a large part of American politics. Constructed affluence and elitism probably has some play in small-d democratic politics, but the opposite is quite obviously more important or more common. Aw shucks country lawyers abound. The mechanism is surely rooted in the…