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As a muddy boots member of the Mekong Delta Yacht Club who was raised in Jim Crow south, there are things done and said then that would not survive today if I were running for public office. I did just miss getting tattooed in Hong Kong, needing to sleep it off. My selection would not have been politically correct. Neither were my attitudes. I certainly didn’t know about hate iconography until some decades later. My delight in blowing things up as an explosive ordnance disposal officer was real.
My point: we change, we learn. We acknowledge and own what we’ve done. And we move on, unless like our current president, we feel we are too good, we are better than the people who voted for him.
Graham Platner has said and done things that were ill advised, some being as a young jarhead, others as someone trying to find a way. They don’t fit the polished resume of an aspiring politician. He probably hadn’t planned to seek national office.
What is important now is to ask what a candidate wants to do, what would they want to accomplish. Ask this question of Gov. Janet Mills who indeed did stand up to President Donald Trump and has two terms of whole Maine electability. What does she want to do as a fresh first-year senator?
Ben Fuller
Cushing
