This article from The Hill this morning did a fantastic job in addressing the two Senate nominees that are causing each of their respective parties huge headaches. I told everyone I knew back home in Texas to vote against Paxton because he is such a liability, and I know several of my Democratic colleagues are very uneasy about Planter as well. Both populist candidates show the issue with populism and how supporters are more than willing to carry the baggage of the candidate under the idea of furthering their ideas.

But then it gets tricky. Once we get into excusing the misconduct of populist leaders for the sake of the cause, how do we know when to stop? It took more than 30 years after César Chávez died before the story of his many abuses of the women in his organization was finally told. Indeed, the protection of bad people for good causes often creates the spaces where worse behavior can follow.

If the answer to questions about character can be “you don’t know what time it is,” there’s a pretty good chance that it will never be considered a good time to do the right thing.

Above is what the article closed with, and to me, it is a spot-on take. We cannot keep excusing the bad behavior of populists in the U.S., including Trump. Americans need to hold their leaders accountable because right now that isnt happening on either side, right or left.

People may debate whether Graham Platner or Ken Paxton is more unfit to serve in the United States Senate. But the answers will mostly depend on one’s partisan preferences.

For a few folks, their own particular detestation of certain vices might be material. You may think that Paxton is worse because many of the allegations against him relate to abuse of public office as Texas attorney general, while Platner’s transgressions were as a private citizen and, so far, seem to have occurred before he was the Democrats’ de facto Maine Senate nominee.

You may believe Planter is worse because of the allegations of antisemitism, while Paxton’s scandals are ecumenical. But unless you are interested in committing a very specific kind of election fraud, you will not actually have to choose. Platner is Maine’s problem, Paxton is Texas’s. 

A very reasonable position for someone living in neither state would be to say that both are unfit and hope that both are defeated. But if you believe it matters very, very much which party controls the Senate from 2027 to 2029, you may still care a great deal which scandal-soaked candidate makes it to Washington. 

Partisans, therefore, have an intense interest in explaining why their guy represents the lesser evil in order to maintain some shred of consistency in attacking the other party as the champion of misogyny, cruelty, infidelity and corruption. As then-Sen. Al Franken learned in 2017 when Democrats were trying to apply maximum pressure on Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore for his own allegedly creepy behavior, maintaining the appearance of the moral high ground even in seemingly unrelated cases can require sacrifices to be made.  

The truth is, of course, that the cases of Paxton and Platner really are very different, and the issues involved, while both relating to the character of the candidates, are rightfully only matters for the voters of those states to decide in relation to the other candidate on their ballots. It’s not Platner vs. Paxton; it’s whether a voter can abide either one of them compared to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) or Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D). Those questions are as different as Maine and Texas are themselves.

But in one big, important way for every American voter, the two damaged Senate candidates are the same. In both cases, their supporters believe that the power of their ideas — and the force with which they would seek to implement them — are worth hauling their baggage. Perhaps the baggage itself is even evidence of the necessary character and thinking to deliver the profound change their most fervent supporters deem necessary. 

Paxton and Platner embody the politics of scandal very particular to populist movements.

This is not the Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon version in which the flaws of a gifted leader are acknowledged and, for a time, accepted as an unfortunate cost of also benefiting from their actual abilities. “Slick Willie” and “Tricky Dick” were kinds of compliments: nicknames that acknowledged their intelligence and preternatural political gifts. The implicit argument was that they were winners who could do the job and would be worth the sleaze.

That is most decidedly not what Democrats in Maine and Republicans in Texas were saying in their support of Platner and Paxton. In both cases, partisans had reasonable, safe, competent and scandal-free choices who would have been much easier to get across the finish line in November. But nominating Gov. Janet Mills (D) in Maine or keeping Sen. John Cornyn (R) in Texas was, to primary voters in their states, unacceptable. 

Note that when Platner first answered questions about the latest revelations about his conduct — that his wife had warned the campaign about her husband’s explicit texts with women he met online even after their 2023 marriage — he blamed the revelation on establishment forces within his party for trying to “destroy” his life in order to prevent his policies about affordable housing and income inequality from being heard. His message was that if you are given pause by these new, more recent revelations about his conduct, you are being manipulated by big corporations. They’re trying to destroy him because they don’t want the people to be empowered to throw off their chains etc.

That’s very much like what Paxton said about his impeachment and federal corruption prosecution. When his fellow Republicans brought charges against him, Paxton declared “this weaponization of our political system was designed to intimidate, bankrupt, silence, and punish me for representing the voters instead of the entrenched political establishment.”

They are like many famed populists past and present — such as President Trump, Huey Long or the Rev. Jesse Jackson — in that accusations of corruption or wrongdoing aren’t treated as liabilities so much as evidence of the underlying premises of their movements. Of course the Biden Justice Department or Standard Oil or right-wing watchdogs are coming after them — it’s because they fear them.

There’s usually something to the claims. Democrats did want to see Trump punished after Jan. 6, 2021, and ambitious local prosecutors stretched the law to try to do so. Standard Oil did want to get rid of Long and his excise taxes. Right-wingers would have loved to have ended Jackson’s corporate pressure campaigns by discrediting his organization.

But then it gets tricky. Once we get into excusing the misconduct of populist leaders for the sake of the cause, how do we know when to stop? It took more than 30 years after César Chávez died before the story of his many abuses of the women in his organization was finally told. Indeed, the protection of bad people for good causes often creates the spaces where worse behavior can follow.

If the answer to questions about character can be “you don’t know what time it is,” there’s a pretty good chance that it will never be considered a good time to do the right thing.