A Face in the Crowd

The meteoric rise and torturous fall of Graham Platner in Democratic Party politics may seem perplexing. How could the Democratic Socialists of America select such a man without due diligence? How could the Democratic Party leave itself open to be put at his mercy when Maine plays such a key role in their quest to regain the Senate?

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The story parallels the plot of the 1957 movie, A Face In The Crowd. Written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face In The Crowd follows the rise and fall of a media-created Everyman named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith.

While recording a segment in an Arkansas jail for a local radio show, Marcia Jeffries meets inmate Larry Rhodes, who impresses her with his guitar playing and homespun patter. When Rhodes makes an impression on her audience, Marcia helps him get his own radio show, and his seemingly authentic personality lets him parlay that into a national television show based in New York. His charisma and influence attract the attention of aspiring Presidential candidate Senator Fuller, who asks Rhodes to give the senator a folksy appeal,

But Rhodes develops delusions of grandeur. One night, he brags of his sway over his audience, saying, “This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep!”

Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don’t know it yet, but they’re all gonna be ‘Fighters for Fuller’. They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I’m gonna be the power behind the president — and you’ll be the power behind me!

A horrified Marcia goes to the control booth and activates the studio microphone. A live national audience hears Rhodes speaking to one of his staff as the show’s closing credits roll:

Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got ’em like this… You know what the public’s like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They’re a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they’ll flap their flippers.

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The reaction is sudden and devastating. The Lonesome Rhodes Show’s ratings collapse as he becomes a pariah.

Like Rhodes, Platner was plucked from obscurity by people looking for a fresh face, in his case, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, two DSA operatives tasked with finding a Senate candidate to represent the DSA. Like Rhodes, his handlers were so besotted by his charisma that they thrust him into the public eye without adequately vetting his background or behavior. Like Rhodes, his audience projected their own hopes and fears onto him and saw the image of a savior to redeem their electoral hopes and societal ambitions. Like Rhodes, they propelled him to the heights of a U.S. Senate race, but where Rhodes was a puppeteer manipulating a senator, Platner was the candidate. Platner has the same folksy appeal as the fictional Senator Fuller, saying in his primary night victory speech, “If you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.”

And then the stories diverge. Given the mores of the 1950s, his audience reacts with disgust to Rhodes’s betrayal when he reveals how he really feels towards them. When unsavory bits and pieces of Platner’s background came out, even before the election, not only did his voters stick with him, so did the DSA and many prominent Democrats.

During the primary, more prominent Democrats, both in elected office and in the pundit class, fell in line behind him — even as more sordid allegations came to light. As he repeated assurances that no more revelations would surface, and as new revelations surfaced to prove his promises hollow, his Democratic Party supporters would not publicly accuse him of betrayal. The primary (though not sole) exception was Senator John Fetterman, who rejected Platner immediately when his Totenkopf chest tattoo was publicized.

In contrast to Lonesome Rhodes’s immediate fall from grace, Platner’s audience stayed with him as long as he appeared able to defeat Senator Susan Collins in November. As his poll numbers faltered, their support wavered. When a new accuser stepped forward with allegations of sexual assault, backed by contemporaneous corroboration from friends and associates, that support finally crumbled. People who only a week before assured the voters that Platner was “[their] kind of man” turned on him and called on him to step down. The stories converge again, as Platner, like Rhodes, refused to bow out gracefully and promptly.

Now that Platner has withdrawn under fire, the Democrats in Maine have coalesced around Troy Jackson, former president of the Maine State Senate. His appeal, however, isn’t based on his political experience but rather on his workingman credibility as a fifth-generation logger. It seems like Maine Democrats have settled on just another face in the crowd.

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Image: MAINEiac4434