campaign biography candidates
A lot (probably too much) has been written about Graham Platner's faux working class credentials. Takes galore. Here's some scattered orthogonal thoughts.
The whole episode is a specific example of a more general phenomenon, and that is the political presentation of self. Every politician inherently constructs a public identity and persona; this can be more or less intentional, and it can be more or less correlative with their private identity/persona, but it's always going to exist. I think that's probably more intuitive than ever for most people, given how social media forces everyone with an online profile to confront the concept head-on and personally.
Trying to be more working-class or more a "man of the people" has always been a large part of American politics. Constructed affluence and elitism probably has some play in small-d democratic politics, but the opposite is quite obviously more important and more common. Aw shucks country lawyers abound. The mechanism is surely rooted in the search for trust. Voters choose candidates on partisanship and issue positions, but on the margins you are selling yourself to swing voters trying to decide who to believe. A class-based connection is a conduit to electoral trust. This is Jane Mansbridge's "gyroscopic representation," in which voters get their preferred policies by simply putting the "right" people into office.
It's relatively easy to fake a tough upbringing and a life overcoming hardship, at least for a cursory inspection. Here's mine: my parents were on food stamps when I was born. My dad died when I was a teenager, leaving my mom to support me and my younger sister on an upstate NY primary school teacher's salary. I worked as a janitor all through college, and supported myself by playing poker while I put myself through grad school. I felt completely out of place in the Ivy League, where seemingly everyone was rich and had already traveled the world; I had $9,000 to my name, and the only foreign places I had ever been were Quebec and Ontario.
All of that is true, and yet it gives you an absurdly wrong impression of my life, which was comfortable and upper-middle-class the entire way. Some of this is the Noah Smith thesis about the upward potential energy of the middle class existing alongside temporary relative poverty, but some of it is just that it's easy to cherry-pick your background. I don't think my story is special or even uncommon. It's just what happens when you are allowed to sum up your life in five sentences and have an incentive to write the hardscrabble version.
For this reason, I'm always skeptical of campaign biography candidates. That is, people who put their "story" a little too much at the forefront of their presentation of self relative to their issue positions, experience, and skill. Platner did exactly that, and it's part of what made me wary of him from the jump.
It's also just a really weak signal of character and/or virtue, which is what I care about in a candidate beyond policy positions, experience, and skill. I don't begrudge people who seek or like ascriptive representation for it's own sake, but too often it's viewed by parties as the sufficient condition to prove virtue. A lot of gyroscopic representation seeks to collapse character and virtue into the familiarity of race / ethnicity / religion / class / profession. Whatever the values of those are as signals of politics, they are hardly solid evidence of character, one way or another.
American small-d democratic politics also has a strong preference for authenticity, which is a vague concept but surely related to the construction of Plantner the working-class oyster farmer. The desire for authenticity reminds me of the distinction between rock music fans and fans of country and/or pop music. Rock fans are obsessed with authenticity. A band that hires studio musicians? A band that doesn't write it's own songs? A band put together by a record label? This is all complete poison in rock. In country or pop? The best songwriters write the songs, the best producers arrange and record the music in the studio, and the best performers sing them. The inauthentic constructed-nature of it, to a first approximation, bothers no one. The product matters, not the story.
So that's the push and pull of American electoral politics for me. You don't want scumbag losers like Platner. Character and virtue matter. But they are much easier to see in the negative. Proving positive virtue often boils down to a demonstration of authenticity and trust built around connecting with typical voters. There's nothing wrong with that per se and it's the obvious incentive of the market reality of the electorate. But it probably over-indexes us toward campaign biography candidates and campaigns at the expense of examinations of issues positions, experience, and skill.