On Graham Platner

I drove eight hours round trip today to Maine to introduce Graham Platner for about ninety seconds.

That was the actual math of the day. Four hours up, four hours back, all for a brief introduction at an event. And honestly, before today, I had never even met him in person. We had Zoomed. He had spoken with us at Veterans For Responsible Leadership, which I left after Trump was reelected, out of frustration and weariness, and Scott Peoples runs now (donate at vfrl.org, even 20 bucks matters). As for Platner, I knew his story broadly. Veteran. Outspoken. Willing to absorb attacks from his own side over Donald Trump. I respected him already, but politics is full of people who can perform authenticity over Zoom. It is full of people who know how to tell a room exactly what it wants to hear.

What I saw today was something different.

I saw a man who gets it.

During one of our earlier conversations, I asked him what Senate committees interested him. There was an obvious answer there. The answer every consultant in America would tell a veteran candidate to give to a room full of veterans. Veterans Affairs. Armed Services. Something safe and applause-friendly.

Instead, he said agriculture.

Agriculture.

It was such a terrible political answer for the audience he was in that it immediately told me it was honest. He wasn’t trying to manipulate us emotionally with his service. He wasn’t trying to make the military his entire personality. He wasn’t performing veteran identity for political points. What he showed with that answer was maturity. The war mattered, but it was not the entirety of who he was. He was thinking about Maine. The future. Farming. Communities. Actual governance.

I have been waiting for our champion. Not a perfect champion. A real one, a GWOT veteran who is finally willing to say the quiet parts out loud.

Al Qaeda had it coming, but most of us never actually saw an Al Qaeda member.

American kids answered the call after 9/11 because Americans always answer the call. That is one of the beautiful things about this country. When the nation asks for sacrifice, young Americans step forward. Every single generation. They leave their hometowns and families and certainty because they believe service means something bigger than themselves.

And many of them died. I saw some of them die. They’re gone. They stiffened in death with a body bag as a shroud in the back of HMMVW or a CH-47.

Over time, for many veterans, the mission narrows. You stop thinking in terms of geopolitics and start thinking about the man next to you. The medic. The gunner. The friend who makes you laugh. You do not want to fail him. That becomes the mission. It’s just, “we’re in this thing together cause we said we would be in it together, I’ll die here with you, but I won’t leave you.”

I counted 11 of Platner’s Marine Corps buddies there, from Kilo company. A man in the audience asked if he was ready for the $50 million in Republican dollars coming into the state. He shrugged.

Here’s what I think: If I’m a Republican donor, I’m calling the RNC tonight because of this: what the fuck are you gonna say? He carried a SAW, or a .60, through enough combat for 2 Navy SEAL lifetimes. I didn’t get a chance to ask which one.

Go ahead. Attack him. He’s one of us. He’s walked Section 60. He’s upset that the dumbest President in American history is illegally going to war in Iran.

Go ahead, Lara Trump, come on up to New England with your ads and waste some money.

He’s going to win.

I disagree on unimportant things with Graham. I’m not as angry as Graham. I expected to be lied to by my government during my service, but what I got out of it was the test of myself I wanted. Believe me though, I get it. When you’re a GWOT veteran who wasn’t on the Bin Laden raid, you can’t believe you “made a difference” aside from giving JSOC forward operating bases, and years later, you look back and realize how many people in Washington were lying, improvising, posturing, or simply too stupid to understand the consequences of their decisions.

That frustration is real.

And Graham does not hide from it.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I agree with who he is, up to and including the anger. Up to and including being frustrated watching friends die for outcomes that increasingly felt detached from anything resembling strategic clarity. Up to and including posting some snark online because you are disgusted by watching the same people who cheerlead these wars suddenly pretend they never supported them once the political winds change.

That is not extremism to me.

That is honesty.

And honesty is in desperately short supply right now.

One of the things that struck me while listening to Graham today was that he has managed to stay morally awake. A lot of people either drift into cynicism or surrender themselves completely to tribal politics. Graham has done neither. He can acknowledge that Al Qaeda deserved destruction while also acknowledging that America spent twenty years wandering through wars most of the country barely understood. He can honor service without romanticizing every decision made by politicians. He can love the country without lying about what happened to it.

That balance is rare.

And frankly, it is exactly what we need more of in public life.

Because now we are watching it happen again. The stupidest president in American history bit the hook Benjamin Netanyahu set, and once again, America is being emotionally maneuvered toward another cycle of escalation by people who will never personally bear the consequences of it. The people beating the drums the loudest are almost never the ones whose children will carry rifles.

Graham sees that.

He understands the difference between patriotism and manipulation. Between defending America and reflexively stumbling into every conflict because politicians are too weak or cowardly to say no.

And maybe what resonated most with me today was that none of this felt rehearsed. None of it felt focus-grouped. He did not feel like a consultant-built candidate engineered in a lab somewhere. He felt like a guy a lot of veterans actually know. Actually are. Angry sometimes. Imperfect sometimes. Maybe said some dumb things online once in a while. But fundamentally decent. Fundamentally honest. Fundamentally unwilling to lie to himself anymore.

That is as real as it gets. Politics right now is full of polished mannequins pretending to be human beings. Graham Platner is the opposite. He is a human being willing to enter politics. There is a difference.

I drove eight hours today for a ninety-second introduction, and I would do it again tomorrow, because after meeting him in person, after watching how he talks to people, how he thinks, how he carries himself, I am all in.

Vote Platner. Donate to Platner. I have never endorsed a candidate before on this medium. I do now, with alacrity.

America desperately needs more people like him willing to step forward before this entire thing disappears into cynicism, performative outrage, and endless war.

One piece of advice, though, if you attend a Platner event, don’t worry too much about the dress code.

I’ll remember that, next time I go.