The Graham Platner saga continues in Maine, as the beleaguered Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate somehow continues to defy party bosses, who want to ditch him as quickly as possible. Platner has found himself at the heart of several scandals, ranging from his comments saying a wounded U.S. soldier didn’t deserve to live to the Nazi tattoo emblazoned on his chest. But it is the recent allegation by a former girlfriend who claims Platner was drunk and raped her that has Democrats running for the hills to get as far away from the candidate as possible. Yet, Platner has consistently rebuffed the effort to get him to quit, and if he does not step down before a July 13th deadline, Maine Democrats will have an almost impossible task of replacing him as their candidate. Former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino appeared on 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program to assess Platner’s odds of political survival, and how his candidacy will ultimately wind up.
Astorino feels Platner may just dig his heels in and force the Democrats to live with their “everyman” choice: “He night stay in, and look, he’s been through a lot and has survived. I mean, think of all the things that would have been a non-starter for anyone else, or any other, let’s just say, any Republican. You had Elizabeth Warren, after knowing everything about this guy up until two days ago, saying, ‘He’s my kind of guy’- okay, what a disgusting dirtbag you like. I mean, if he does survive past the 13th, then Republicans are just going to continue to fire at him every single day and he’ll just bleed out, I think.”
At the end of the day, Astorino says the Democrats have only themselves to blame in a desperate bid to unseat Susan Collins from her Senate seat: “This guy has no job whatsoever, so he can sit there and tell somebody, ‘I’m staying on this line unless you give me dot dot dot.” I mean, if you want to talk brass tactics, that’s exactly what he can do right now, because he’s got everybody by the you-know-whats in the Democratic party, and it’s all their fault.”
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