Is Fetterman well enough to serve?
John Fetterman’s debate performance against his rival, Republican Mehmet Oz, for a seat in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday night was as bad as it gets. The lieutenant governor and former mayor of Braddock, the victim of a stroke last May, stumbled over his words so badly and so often that it was hard to watch.
Yes, he’s recovering from the stroke, which left him with an “auditory processing” impairment that may or may not be permanent. Yes, he’s better now that he was. But is John Fetterman well enough to take on the high stakes, high pressure job he’s seeking?
Medically, I can’t say. I’m not a doctor.
Speaking as a voter and citizen of Pennsylvania, my answer is yes. Fetterman is fit for the job in ways Oz is not.
If you watched the debate, you may have noticed something. As the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty first reported, the look on Fetterman’s face at the very end of the debate was one of frustration. He undoubtedly knew how poorly he had performed.
With control of the Senate on the line, with the future of American democracy possibly at stake, Fetterman’s failure might turn out to be historic, in the very largest sense of that word.
Maybe it was that pressure; or the day or the hour that was especially inauspicious for Fetterman; or maybe it was the prospect of facing down Oz, a TV celebrity doctor who has spent years honing a slick on-air personality. It can be argued that only Dr. Kildare, Dr. Welby, and Dr. Phil have more experience in front of a camera than Oz.
Fetterman was not the same man on Tuesday that he was earlier in the month when he took questions from the PennLive-Patriot News of Harrisburg editorial board. (You can watch the hour-long exchange on your laptop or other device.)
The editorial board discussion cast Fetterman in a different light. For sure, his ability to process the spoken word, both giving and receiving, was still compromised. He still stumbled, but the stumbling was hardly a handicap in getting across what he wanted to say.
He was actually eloquent at times. He was asked, right off the bat, why he was running for the Senate. He answered by referring back to his early days in struggling Braddock, as a young man fresh from Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government. (Fetterman grew up well-off in York County, where his father built and operated a successful insurance agency.)
As most politicians of this day and age do, he pivoted to the subject of “values.”
“I think,” Fetterman said, “you can best determine what your values are by where you choose to spend your life and your career. I came to Braddock. I came to run a GED program” for high school dropouts.
“There’s no money in that,” he continued, “there’s no glamor. It was a commitment to make sure that people had the opportunity to get their education back on track.”
Fetterman stayed on in Braddock, eventually running for mayor, a job with barely a salary and precious little power or responsibility. He formed a nonprofit, Braddock Redux, to fund the projects that he hoped would lead to the revitalization of the beleaguered steel town.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, Fetterman’s attempts garnered both fans and critics in predominantly African-American Braddock. He virtually ignored the town council in favor of his nonprofit. His vision included artists’ lofts and a hipster restaurant.
His “go-it-alone” operational mode hardly endeared him to a segment of Braddock’s political establishment, the Post article makes clear.
But the fact that he was elected three times suggests a majority in the town of 1,700 supported his valiant efforts.
Meanwhile, Oz turned from the full-time practice of medicine to hosting a daytime television show that was notorious for peddling miracle cures. Oz became a medical huckster, a TV quack.
In the opening moments of Tuesday’s debate, Fetterman awkwardly alluded to the fact that he wanted to represent in the Senate his fellow-citizens who have been knocked down and are struggling to get back up, mirroring his own recovery from a stroke in the struggles of ordinary Pennsylvanians.
Is John Fetterman fit to serve? I think so.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently of, “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.