Graham Platner to @daveweigel.bsky.social:
"How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh, my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’"
DSCC Chair Gillibrand: “It’s up to the voters of Maine to decide.”
This whole saga has got me marveling at the shift into the “post through it” era.
Al Franken, a sitting US senator, was accused of being a bit of a creep (to be clear, the shit he was accused of is unacceptable behavior, but I think most people would assume that pretty much every male senator/congressman does or has done worse), then those allegations panned out and were corroborated by others, and the resulting outrage lead to his resignation all within the span of about two months. He resigned in 2018. That was still normal back then, if you had a major scandal you were pretty much done for. Sure the shift was occurring to always posting through it but even Republicans couldn’t get away with that consistently yet. A very popular US senator was led out behind the shed by top party officials and put down because of sexual misconduct allegations, meanwhile less than a decade later some guy who is just planning to run for something is caught with Nazi iconography etched onto his body and steadfastly defending others with Nazi tattoos is being defended to the hilt by those same party officials. Not only is he instinctively trying to post through it, but the rest of the Democratic apparatus is instinctively trying to post through it with him. Imagine if they could do productive things at such a breakneck pace.
The metoo movement led to increased scrutiny of the al franken case. When Biden had a ton of accusations the party openly abandoned metoo during the march 2020 shenanigans
Politicos collectively asked themselves “what if we didn’t force our nazis and sex pests to resign after the big scandalTM?”, realized the answer was “nothing”, and gave us the world we live in now
I think it’s more that they saw Trump constantly trying to ignore all that shit and get increasingly rewarded for it. The biggest political mistakes he made in his first term were all from acting like the kind of politician for whom “How dare you sir? How absolutely dare you?” is a knockout punch.
By the second half of his first term the entire Republican party had embraced his approach and once Bernie started making headway in 2019 the Dems quickly followed suit.
This whole saga has got me marveling at the shift into the “post through it” era.
Al Franken, a sitting US senator, was accused of being a bit of a creep (to be clear, the shit he was accused of is unacceptable behavior, but I think most people would assume that pretty much every male senator/congressman does or has done worse), then those allegations panned out and were corroborated by others, and the resulting outrage lead to his resignation all within the span of about two months. He resigned in 2018. That was still normal back then, if you had a major scandal you were pretty much done for. Sure the shift was occurring to always posting through it but even Republicans couldn’t get away with that consistently yet. A very popular US senator was led out behind the shed by top party officials and put down because of sexual misconduct allegations, meanwhile less than a decade later some guy who is just planning to run for something is caught with Nazi iconography etched onto his body and steadfastly defending others with Nazi tattoos is being defended to the hilt by those same party officials. Not only is he instinctively trying to post through it, but the rest of the Democratic apparatus is instinctively trying to post through it with him. Imagine if they could do productive things at such a breakneck pace.
The metoo movement led to increased scrutiny of the al franken case. When Biden had a ton of accusations the party openly abandoned metoo during the march 2020 shenanigans
Politicos collectively asked themselves “what if we didn’t force our nazis and sex pests to resign after the big scandalTM?”, realized the answer was “nothing”, and gave us the world we live in now
I think it’s more that they saw Trump constantly trying to ignore all that shit and get increasingly rewarded for it. The biggest political mistakes he made in his first term were all from acting like the kind of politician for whom “How dare you sir? How absolutely dare you?” is a knockout punch.
By the second half of his first term the entire Republican party had embraced his approach and once Bernie started making headway in 2019 the Dems quickly followed suit.