January 6, 2026

BON APPÉTIT ANOINTS THE DEMOCRATS’ LATEST ‘NEXT BIG THING:’

There are few positions in life greater than being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party; you start getting ludicrously generous coverage, even from publications that are only marginally connected to politics. Back in 2007, Men’s Vogue suddenly put former North Carolina senator John Edwards on the cover. (An actual sentence from the profile: “The hair, up close, is peppered with tiny strands of blond. Chestnut brown and so finely trimmed, mellifluous, smooth, and feathery, it could almost be a weave, the Platonic ideal as imagined by the Hair Club for Men.”)

Back in 2008, Men’s Health declared longtime smoker Barack Obama was one of the 25 fittest men in America. And who could forget Beto O’Rourke on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2019, declaring he was “was born” to be in the presidential race, with his glum-looking dog seeming to know how his presidential bid was going to go? Or the French fashion magazine Marie Claire putting failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on the cover in 2021?

This isn’t just garden-variety liberal media bias; these are once-apolitical publications suddenly giving laudatory soft-focus coverage of a figure, portraying him as the coolest guy ever. In these profiles, the not-so-political audience of the magazine usually doesn’t get told a lot about the figure’s policy positions; often those positions are airbrushed beyond recognition. (In 2017, Vogue insisted that New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand was an economic centrist, an iconoclast, and a campaigning powerhouse with cross-party appeal. She was and is none of those things.)

Bon Appetit has announced that the year is Springtime for Graham Platner, but there are a few problems here.  As Jim Geraghty writes, “Hey, just out of curiosity… if a Republican Senate candidate said he had accidentally gotten a logo of the Nazi SS tattooed to his chest, would they be getting soft-focus glowing profiles in major culinary magazines? Nah, I didn’t think so.”

Tweet continues:

In a deep, gravely voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in a truck commercial, he talks about his decade of military service, and “farming oysters to feed my community.” Interspliced are shots of him hauling up oyster cages, sliding a knife into an oyster to shuck it, handing a fresh oyster to a little girl. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he growls. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”*

I’m picturing some readers asking, “what the f— is this Pyongyang-level propaganda doing in my food and recipes magazine?”

You could see last year when the DNC-MSM hype machine was getting waaaay over its skis trying to promote the candidate du jour:

With brats and coconuts failing to catch on, the following month, the DNC-MSM tried to achieve strength through joy (a slogan which Platner might appreciate as well):

In the last full month of the campaign, things were getting eye-poppingly bad for the left:

“Like a magic spell from Dungeons and Dragons, being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party also grants the bearer of that title temporary immunity to all potential criticisms and attacks,” Geraghty writes. “But as Walz demonstrated, once you lose that title, you also lose that immunity, and past scandals can catch up with you.”

* Isn’t it always?

UPDATE: Via Joseph Campbell, New York magazine’s Dewey Defeats Truman moment in 2016:

As the magazine’s editors admitted a couple of weeks later, “even as we stubbornly maintain that the image is more complex than a certain notorious, erroneous headline from 1948, it is true that seeing the cover on the newsstand after Election Day makes us cringe — and that the vote turned an image meant to be provocative into one that perhaps feels hubristic instead.”

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll