HUGH HEWITT: Graham Platner’s past shows why no candidate can outrun the limelight

Do you want to run for a highly contested office in the national election? Start considering your decision with the Bible.

Indeed. Specifically, the Gospel of Luke, chapter 8, verse 17: “For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing hidden that will not be known and come to light. (New King James Version.)

Roman Catholics have long been urged to think regularly about the ‘four last things’: death, judgment, heaven and hell. “Judgment” comes with consideration of a man or woman’s entire life. The basic premise about God’s nature is that God knows all things – that he knows everything (and is omnipresent and omnipotent).

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This was not always the case with political sources. Sometimes the national and even local media are involved in hiding facts that are known by others but not widely shared. The escape of President John F. Kennedy was known by many in the elite media of the Beltway and perhaps in Massachusetts, but those who knew him and loved him were not willing to say. That’s perhaps the most famous example of media collusion in covering up scandals, but it’s a bipartisan tradition not to wash dirty laundry in public.

Now more than ever, every candidate must be warned again and again that Luke 8:17 is very true and inescapable for every candidate in every race where any opponent has the means to dig deep.

That time is over. President Obama is said to have believed that “if you can win, you must” as a definition of playing hardball in politics. Most republics live by the same rule. Politics is far, far away from actual war or life-and-death struggles, but as Finley Peter Dunne’s famous creature Mr. As Dooley put it, “politics is not a beanbag” either. It’s a tough and scary game, and many lives are changed, if not disrupted, when the world’s attention turns to the history of every candidate on whom the searchlights are shined.

Now more than ever, every candidate must be warned again and again that Luke 8:17 is very true and inescapable for every candidate in every race where any opponent has the means to dig deep. As the number of media platforms has grown and grown, so has the number of journalists eager for the “scoop” and anything close to it.

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Producing dirty linen on any candidate – “R” or “D” – generates clicks and thus increases the journalist’s profile with a written line. No rumor is too dangerous to check. And every old girlfriend or boyfriend, business competitor or partner, even a family member who has the results of solving campaigns to view as an opportunity not to be missed.

That is why every prospective candidate must first submit to self-examination and then to a panel of “friendly” experts who specialize in digging up “counter-research.”

If a bad story exists, it can be found, and it will be found. And it will be on every front page.

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Which brings us to the people who recruited Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner. Platner dropped out of the Senate race in Maine on Wednesday night. Platner owns his life story. Whatever he did or didn’t do can’t be undone or undone. They are just the facts of all life, and no life will emerge unscathed from the search for – and often hot – revision.

This is what candidates should fully understand. Everything will come out. All bad and not much good. Warning is pre-armed.

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In his classic book, “Hardball,” former MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews expressed this old but true wisdom: If you have a political problem, hang a lamp on it.

Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner. Platner announced on July 8 that he was leaving the race. (Graeme Sloan/Getty Images; Sophie Park/Getty Images)

Show the worst parts of your life and history at the beginning of the campaign. If your election can’t survive disclosure and apology, your election will fail, and the failure will be painful when it comes.

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But if his one-time supporters don’t put these hard facts about the hard realities of politics in 2026, the candidate may be angrier at them now than he is at himself right now.

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If you were misled by what might be written, it would not be an unreasonable answer.

But Platner’s saga is already a tale that should be told by every candidate in every race that will hit the road in the coming years: “[N]there is a secret that cannot be revealed.”

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show“Hear weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on the Salem News Channel. Hugh calls Americans home on the East Coast and lunch on the West Coast to more than 400 embassies across the country, and on every broadcast platform where SNC can be seen. He is a regular guest on Fox News Channel on the Brett news program at 6 pm. Ohio and graduation from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. of television, MSN has also written for MSN television writers and moderated Republican debate scores, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in 2015-16 Hewitt focuses his radio show and column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians on and tens of thousands of Trump Republicans and Donald Bush’s 40 years in broadcasting.

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