Fetterman Is the Democrats’ Stand-Up Guy By Jeffrey Blehar
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fetterman-is-the-democrats-stand-up-guy/
I was wrong about John Fetterman. I misjudged the man’s ability, his character, and his strength. Writing an encomium to a reliably Democratic senator is an odd position for a conservative opinion writer to find himself in, and yet I have done so before. Given current events, however, it feels like a particularly appropriate time to reiterate the point, and explain why I missed so badly on him initially.
It was overdetermined, really; I was deeply skeptical of Fetterman’s ability to serve as senator after his stroke while on the campaign trail in 2022. I never much cared for his working-man shtick — his personal dress habits may be slovenly, but he comes from family money. And I had my partisan desires regardless. (That this put me in the awkward position of preferring a quack TV doctor from New Jersey was merely another one of the many indignities Republicans have had heaped upon them since 2015.) And when Fetterman got to Washington, his first move of note was having the Senate dress code temporarily revised to allow his own peculiar brand of sweatpants chic, which didn’t help either.
But even at the time, one thing was pleasantly clear: Fetterman was making a surprisingly strong recovery from his stroke and, equally as surprising, from the crippling depression that accompanied it. (In all honesty, that was the most important thing of all.) And then, he started going a little bit off the reservation as well: When Senator Robert Menendez was indicted in one of the most amusingly sleazy corruption scandals of recent New Jersey history, which is saying something, Fetterman literally jumped the line ahead of anyone in the Republican Party not only to denounce Menendez but also to clown on him brutally in public. (“Today sure would be a great day to resign, Bob!” remains my favorite political line of 2023, and it was spoken by Fetterman to Menendez as they were sharing an escalator in the Capitol building.)
October 7 was his public turning point, however: Since that awful day, he has been a genuine beacon of moral clarity in the midst of a maelstrom of confusion enveloping the Left as the Gaza war unfolds. At a time last fall when far too many of his peers were running for cover or advocating a cease-fire before Israel had even responded — in fear of their own staffers as much as anything else — he chose to stand firmly against Hamas terrorism. What’s more, he did so eloquently and has never budged since, even as pressure on the Biden administration to force a cease-fire mounts to potential Democratic-coalition-blowout levels.
He is seemingly impossible to intimidate; when protesters camped outside his Pennsylvania home chanting for intifada, he simply went to his roof to hoist an Israeli flag and make them even angrier. Nor has he been a mindless sloganeer; though his position no doubt infuriates the progressive Left, he has articulated his logic clearly and consistently as far back as October. Unlike most of the protesters, Fetterman seems to have actually bothered to read Hamas’s founding charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel. They have never deviated from that political theology: “Hamas does not want peace, they want to destroy Israel. We can talk about a ceasefire after Hamas is neutralized.”
So this week, in the wake of the deeply unfortunate accidental Israeli strike on a humanitarian aid group, there was John Fetterman on Wednesday: “Hamas is confident we’re going to capitulate—but it’s never going to be me. Hamas only deserves elimination.” Yesterday, as the Biden administration publicly pressured Israel to “change course,” he wrote, “In this war against Hamas – no conditions for Israel.” He recognizes that allowing Hamas to remain is tantamount to allowing it to rebuild and rearm for future war. And unlike some of his progressive peers, he shares the entirely reasonable opinion that barbaric terrorist regimes are not entitled to commit acts of barbaric terrorism in perpetuity merely because they are currently fashionable with the right crowd.
Are you familiar with that old joke from the Eric Andre Show, where the host asks a guest, “Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?” It’s become ironically memetic shorthand for moments when someone expresses an entirely banal or inoffensive opinion. And yet, strangely enough, Fetterman’s position on the Gaza war fits this frame to an almost shockingly perfect degree: It’s both popular among his constituents, and certainly among Americans at large, while also authentically controversial and brave, certainly when compared to where his Democratic peers in the Senate are. I hesitate to speculate about the origins of the seeming change that has come over him, other than guessing that the discipline and strength of character required to recover from a life-altering stroke also suggests a certain willfulness. (To be fair, I do also like my other theory, which is that Chuck Schumer unwittingly leveled him up by stuffing him back into a suit.) Fetterman has clearly demonstrated he is now his own man and also a savvy hand at public relations; I doubt he’s unaware of the political armor his medical situation gives him, and good for him — he’s wearing it straight into battle.
And yet Fetterman has also noticeably — and this matters to me as well — remained a Democratic loyalist in all substantive ways. Fetterman isn’t behaving like a wild iconoclast or, God forbid, a turncoat Republican; he’s carrying himself like a statewide Pennsylvania Democrat . . . albeit circa the mid 2000s. He voted with the Biden administration 92 percent of the time in 2023, as one would expect from a loyal party member. Only his moral positioning on Israel feels heterodox.
I prefer it this way. I don’t have to pretend Fetterman is a Republican — or ideologically simpatico with me on even a handful of salient domestic political issues — in order to appreciate his taking a morally correct position that has cost him countless friends on the left. The Democratic Party frankly needs more people like that, just as the Republican Party desperately does. It’s a rather poignant comment on the state of modern American politics — the current progress of political polarization, the mindless sorting of once bipartisan issues into Red Team/Blue Team codes — that Fetterman’s willingness to be his own man on these issues earns such credit from those of us who remember an earlier age, a time when our legislators seemed to recognizably care about principles greater than their own personal self-promotion.
Recently it was reported that Fetterman’s entire senior communications team resigned in March, to “go to more progressive spaces.” Whether they did so because they simply felt they could not advocate his position on Israel, or because they feared career and social repercussions if they remained, it is a sad reverse image of the Strange New Respect he is garnering from people like me. Fetterman’s position is mainstream and popular — among his own constituents, in America at large, and not so long ago within his own party — and yet that position is now the sort of thing that threatens to make one a pariah on the left. The sad irony is that the more room the Democrats make for people like him, the better off their electoral prospects will be.
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