Low-Conscientiousness Losers Are Bad Senate Candidates

John Fetterman and Graham Platner both flailed into adulthood, living off their affluent parents while not amounting to much. Why have leftists decided this is a good resume for the U.S. Senate?

Dear readers,

In 2017, John Fetterman, then the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania (population 1,721), was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. This is a serious but common cardiac condition that raises the risk of stroke and can be effectively treated with medication and lifestyle modifications. Fetterman did respond to this diagnosis by losing weight but he didn’t follow up with his cardiologist or take prescribed medication, and five years later he had a stroke that nearly killed him, just a few days before winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.

Graham Platner doesn’t work for a living. As The New York Times reports, the bulk of his income comes from a military disability pension of approximately $60,000 a year. The pension doesn’t mean he’s too disabled to work — he is, after all, currently seeking the job of U.S. Senator — but his recent non-campaign endeavors seem more like hobbies than a career. He runs an oyster farm that principally sells oysters to his mother’s restaurant. He earned a small stipend as his town’s harbor master: $3,000 last year. He lives in a $205,000 house that he bought with a $200,000 loan from his father.

Fetterman, like Platner, remained financially dependent on his parents into his 40s, until he reached a high elected office that paid a meaningful salary: lieutenant governor. People complain about ‘nepo babies,’ but do you know what’s worse than a nepo baby? Someone who grows up with the advantage of privileged birth but is too mediocre or lazy to parlay that advantage into professional success, instead flailing underemployed through middle age on the parental dime until he is somehow rescued from his failure to launch by getting elected to public office. That’s the Fetterman-Platner model.

Platner famously got a tattoo of a somewhat obscure Nazi symbol while he was in the Marines, drunk on shore leave in Croatia. I believe his claim that he didn’t know what the symbol meant when he got the tattoo. I don’t believe he didn’t know what it meant until just a few months ago when he decided to run for Senate and finally got it covered over. Republicans take the tattoo as a sign that Platner has Nazi sympathies, but I find that implausible too, given that his extensive and embarrassing Reddit posting history lays out a leftist political philosophy that is decidedly non-Nazi.

No, the failure to cover the tattoo indicates something different about Platner: Like John Fetterman, he is a fuckup.

These men lack conscientiousness, meaning they don’t take care of the things they should take care of, whether that’s staying on blood thinners, covering up a Nazi tattoo, or getting a job. They are messy and immature, and they make gobsmackingly stupid choices as a result. Platner isn’t just the kind of guy who uses Kik to sext with women who are not his wife — he’s the kind of guy who, after his Kik sexting is discovered during his campaign’s self-opposition research, fails to delete his Kik account before the press finds his profile picture in which he’s shirtless and strategically holding his phone to obscure his Nazi tattoo. (Apparently, he still hasn’t deleted it.) He’s also the kind of guy who forgets his talking points about the issue, denies claims his campaign has already admitted to, and extends the news cycle, forcing his campaign to clarify what he really meant to say.

This is just a man with poor executive function overall, and geniuses in the progressive consultant class and the Maine Democratic electorate have decided to saddle us with him as a Senate candidate.

Platner’s campaign is brought to us by many of the same people who were behind Fetterman’s political rise. Rebecca Katz, who’s now advising Platner and previously was a strategist for Fetterman (and began her career working for John Edwards), says “the era of the perfect candidate is over.” Fetterman, of course, has been decidedly imperfect for the left — breaking with his party over Gaza and Iran and many of Trump’s cabinet nominees. Democrats now fear he will quit the party entirely. Many on Fetterman’s team quit working for him as he moved rightward, but the lesson of his nomination is this: if you nominate people whose life history reflects a high degree of unreliability, they may prove unreliable once in office.

But leftists have fetishized the style of the low-conscientiousness man, in some cases literally: Ken Klippenstein says voters are picking candidates like Platner as a revolt against “asexual” “smoothgroin” politicians who are presumably insufficiently horny to get on Kik and sext with strangers. Klippenstein writes:

Platner’s story here is a pretty common one. This and his other “scandals” sound a lot like other former Marines I know. So when Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office.

First of all, this is unfair to ordinary people. Lots of ordinary Americans are conscientious: they honor their marital commitments, they work for a living, they don’t go on Kik if they’re over the age of 25. Even when they fail at some of these things (likelier the first two than the third), they understand that it is good and aspirational to succeed at them. And I hope at least some ordinary Americans still subscribe to the idea that our leaders should be extraordinary: a member of Congress should be better, on most measures, than the people he or she represents. I can’t be the only person who’s still interested in bourgeois virtues.

But Klippenstein is at least narrowly correct in the sense that Democratic primary voters have clearly looked at Platner and decided they prefer him over Janet Mills, Maine’s very old governor; and four years ago, Democrats in Pennsylvania decided they were much more excited by John Fetterman — what with his hoodies and baggy shorts and his extensive use of the term “jagoff” — than they were by Conor Lamb, a former Marine JAG and assistant U.S. attorney who then got elected to Congress in the Republican-leaning outskirts of Pittsburgh, helping Democrats regain the House majority. I guess Lamb is a “smoothgroin” because he has been consistently employed since college? Back in 2022, leftists seemed to think he was a suspiciously establishment figure, unlike the committedly progressive, anti-establishment Fetterman. But I’ll tell you one thing: If Lamb were in the Senate right now, I don’t think he would have cast the deciding vote that made Markwayne Mullin Homeland Security Secretary.

Klippenstein says Americans are tired of “clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” but one virtue of the consistently-striving Tracy Flick archetype is that these people are consistent. They’ve had a plan since they climbed out of the womb and that helps us know what they will do if they get into office. Leftists have turned “McKinsey” into an epithet, but getting a job at McKinsey is damned hard. My college GPA wasn’t high enough to get hired there. Having worked there is a signal that you work hard, you complete your assignments, you adapt well to new tasks and requirements, and you’re ready to take on new challenges. Is that so bad? We don’t want politicians who are full of surprises. We want ones who set clear goals and then achieve them.

If nothing seriously more embarrassing and damaging comes out, Platner will be able to win a general election in Maine. He is running in a state with a strong Democratic lean and this is going to be a strong Democratic year. Jay Jones, another similarly “imperfect” candidate, managed to get elected attorney general of Virginia last year despite revelations that he was arrested for driving 46 miles an hour over the speed limit and wished death on the children of one of his Republican colleagues. But the “if” at the start of this paragraph is a big “if.” I lack confidence that Platner won’t be further damaged by much more embarrassing stories to come.

Even if he does win, I believe that, as with Fetterman, his unreliable nature — his manifest lack of conscientiousness — will come back to bite Democrats in the ass once he serves in the Senate. Most of all, it is likely to haunt the progressives who poured their hopes and dreams into his “imperfect” vessel, as they did with John Fetterman’s vessel before. As for moderates like me, I am less sure. His unreliability means he might break my way on policy. But then, he might not; Fetterman hasn’t exactly moderated in ways I find appealing.

In either case, this whole misadventure is destined to end more poorly than if Democrats had found a normal candidate under the age of 60 to run in Maine. And once that becomes clear to everyone, I hope the progressive left will learn the lesson they have obstinately failed to learn from the Fetterman episode.

Very seriously,

Josh