I Was Wrong...Sort Of

    That’s right, kids! The title is not a typo. Yes, but only you could cop to being wrong and then say...“Sort of.” Idiot. Maybe. But I still have a couple of issues to work out. Uh-huh...well, let’s hear it. 

    So, I’ve been following, as best I can, the first year of United States Senator, John Fetterman, Democrat of my state of Pennsylvania. Some of you out there may already know this, but while he was running for that office and certainly after he was elected, I was not a fan. Some of my issues were the usual; his political views and philosophy, his platform, etc. But my biggest issue(s) was not only his approach to being a member of the greatest deliberative body in the world, it was his general appearance and, how do I put this nicely...his overall vulgarity. And it is here, dear reader, where we run headlong into the old adage, “Never judge a book by its cover.” 

    Let’s be honest. Senator Fetterman dresses like a flood victim, complete with gray hoodie, basketball shorts down to his knees, high-top sneakers, and sweat socks. And that's fine...if you're playing pick-up at the gym, or lounging around your own home when you have absolutely nothing to do. I mean, he looks like these orphans standing at the school bus stop waiting to be picked up...when it’s 26 degrees and snowing outside! So I get it; there are times when dressing like a waif straight out of a Charles Dickens novel is perfectly acceptable. But for me, I had trouble accepting the fact that a grown man would make that look his everyday, public look as a United States Senator, which is a far cry from an unemployed crack addict in the bowels of Philadelphia. Having said that, I have noticed over the years that this look is popular at most workplaces, all levels of school - from kindergarten to the Ivy League, and even at many churches of all denominations. May the gods have mercy on our souls.

    And it wasn’t just the clothes that gave him that radical aura. It was the tattoos on each arm and the hearty embrace of pot legalization. The easy assumption for me, as well as many others, was that he was going to be a reliable vote for the progressive Left. And there were other reasons for this: he endorsed everyone's favorite socialist, Bernie Sanders, and was in turn, endorsed by Sanders when Fetterman ran for lieutenant governor back in 2018. He also expressed support for Medicare for All, federal student loan “forgiveness,” the Pro Act (which would effectively nullify state right-to-work laws), a ban on fracking. and a "transition" away from fossil fuels. 

    All of which brings us up to the present. In various interviews, from The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, and even to NPR, Fetterman (much to his fellow Democrats chagrin) started tilting to the center. He was the only Democrat to vote for Pam Bondi, President Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department; one of only three to support Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency; and one of only two to vote for Scott Turner as secretary of housing and urban development. (He did vote against Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., among others.)

    Twelve Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act, requiring federal authorities to detain illegal aliens charged with crimes, but Mr. Fetterman was one of only two Democratic cosponsors, and he enjoys dwelling on the subject. In his interview with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), he says “I was always very, and still am very, pro-immigration,” he says. But he asks what a “jury of 100 people in a Walmart parking lot” would think if he told them he favored letting criminals stay in the country illegally. “They’re gonna be like: Hell no, that’s crazy.”

    Other data points: Mr. Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote for the imposition of sanctions on the International Criminal Court for charging Israeli officials with “war crimes.” Democrats and media commentators insisted that Vice President JD Vance had triggered a “constitutional crisis” when he observed that judges can’t “control the executive’s legitimate power.” Mr. Fetterman dismissed the claim as hysterical. And when the president suggested the United States could evacuate, rebuild and repopulate Gaza, Mr. Fetterman—virtually alone among Congressional Democrats—declined to express outrage. 

    Let's not get crazy, here: Fetterman is no Reaganite. But it seems like that whole "judging a book by its cover" thing became a reality for him; or should I say, for people like me. The senator still holds solidly Democratic views. But the hoodie and the tats, which progressives took to signify revolutionary zeal, seem to align him more closely with Walmart shoppers than with the Congressional Progressive Caucus or the Squad.

    And what drives the Left really nuts now, is his unequivocal support for Israel. He is an outlier in his party. In the WSJ interview, referring to an early video the Israelis took to document the atrocities against Israeli citizens by Hamas, he says, “Where does that kind of depravity and that hate, where does it come from? Even the Nazis, with all their depravity, all their evil, they tried to hide those kinds of atrocities. These people filmed it with their GoPros, and they cheered like they scored a goal. In the videos they call their parents and they’re like, ‘Hey, I just killed some Jews.’ Where does that kind of hatred come from?” He wasn't done. “That wasn’t just Hamas, either,” he says. “Let’s not ever forget the majority of the Palestinians support what happened.” Referring to the lurid ceremonies in which Hamas soldiers release hostages, Mr. Fetterman says, “Wow, you’re so tough, terrorizing a woman that you’ve kept in a tunnel for over a year. Like, you’re so tough with your shit rifles parading around. That’s why I’m always going to be on the Israeli side. All right?” He pauses. “Yeah,” he says, “print that.” 

    In a 2021 interview with the Harvard Kennedy School’s quarterly magazine—Mr. Fetterman took a master’s degree in public policy from the school in 1999—he described Robert McNamara’s memoir, In Retrospect (1995), as “one of the most meaningful, impactful books I’ve ever read.” McNamara served as defense secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, from 1961-68, and was largely responsible for U.S. military policy in Vietnam. “For him to admit that he was wrong in a way that was so public,” Mr. Fetterman said in 2021, “about something of which the outcome was so tragic . . . I can’t overstate the profundity of that and how meaningful it has been in public life for me.” In The Wall Street Journal interview, Fetterman is asked if he can admit anything in the field of policy or politics about which he was wrong. It isn’t an easy question for a public official to answer. “Yeah,” he says after a moment, “I want to be thoughtful.” 

    At another point in the interview he says: “I regret some of the dumb shit I said on Twitter at times.” On Groundhog Day in 2017, when he was mayor of Braddock, Pa., he joked that Mr. Trump “saw his shadow—4 more years of fascism.” Other, similarly unkind remarks litter his old posts. As he explains his answer, though, it becomes clear that Mr. Fetterman has more in mind than stupid tweets. “After my near-death thing,” he says, “I’ve kind of lost my appetite for all that.” It's funny how that happens. 

    The “near-death thing” was the stroke he suffered on May 13, 2022, four days before the Democratic Senate primary. After he won, his wife, Gisele, delivered the victory speech for her hospitalized husband. In November, Mr. Fetterman handily defeated Mehmet Oz—with a heavy assist from a mainstream press that all but ignored his condition, presumably on the grounds that he had a D after his name. (And to be fair, Oz is a moron. Sancho could have defeated Oz.) Six weeks after taking office, Mr. Fetterman, struggling with the effects of the stroke, checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to treat his depression. 

    He seems stronger now, although his friends and colleagues say they still notice the effects of his stroke: halting speech and an occasional struggle to pronounce words. Yet what he lost in fluency, he gained in equanimity. In another interview, Fetterman mentions some of Trump’s cabinet appointees. “They’ve all said negative things”—that is, about him—“and it’s like, it doesn’t bother me anymore. We all can say dumb things, and at the end of the day, it’s just cheap heat, it’s just stuff the world would probably be better without.” He sums up: “It all feels different after facing mortality. I almost died.”

    Was his response to the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel an expression of this new outlook—an outlook in which “stupid shit,” as he might put it, has a diminished place? 

    “I mean, yeah,” Mr. Fetterman says. “I was very much supportive of a peaceful solution, a ‘two state solution’ ”—he signals quotation marks with his fingers—“and a lot of the kind of boilerplate issues on the Democratic side.” After Oct. 7 he “really did believe that Israel and the Jewish community deserve at least one consistent voice, and I hoped that wouldn’t have to be me. But I was willing to be the last man standing in my caucus . . . because things can’t ever go back to the way they were.”

    So Fetterman stands pretty much alone, and not just because of his solid support for Israel. He is tired of the bombastic politics of verbal grenades that dominated his early, and even his more recent, political career. “I feel lonely and I am struggling to find what the true North Star is as a committed Democrat," he says. “I'm not changing my party, but what's the way forward?”

    He has tilted to the center on issues like “climate change,” (“And now the media looks at the weather and says it’s on fire, it’s on fire, do something, do something”—a reference, I assume, to the Los Angeles wildfires. “And then they’re all but saying, Hey you Democrats, you have no balls. Do something. And I’m like, Well, what? Yell louder at protests? Go block a road? What? I mean, we’ve done that. You’ve played out the extreme things and you clearly don’t understand what happened.”), “electric vehicles” (“I’m not going to judge somebody or mandate someone buy a certain type of vehicle,” Mr. Fetterman says, “because I’m unsure of the technology. But also, it’s like, Well, what about rare-earth minerals?” He’s referring to the fact that making more EVs requires more imports of rare-earth minerals to build batteries. “The Chinese have us by the balls,” Mr. Fetterman continues in his characteristically earthy way. “And it’s like, do you think that they extract and produce those kinds of minerals without a significant environmental impact?”), and abolishing gas stoves.” Most of his fellow Democrats have ostracized him, but again, he has said that he can't see himself leaving his party for the other side. I don't know anything, but I could see him running as an Independent the next time around. I'm actually beginning to see him as an old-school Democrat in the same mold as one of my favorite politicians of all time; Daniel Patrick Moynihan; he of the great quote, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” But that type of Democrat may be dead...never to return. 

    So now we’ve come full circle. It is said that a Conservative was once a Liberal who got mugged. But Fetterman reminds me of the New Testament adage, “When I was a child, I spake as a child...but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  I had Fetterman pegged as the Progressive’s answer to Trump; a 13-year-old masquerading as an adult, who didn’t get his ass kicked enough when he was younger. I was wrong. When I listen to him now, I hear an intelligent man who has put away childish things. He is willing to say that he was wrong about some things, he is thoughtful, and he has stared into the abyss. I still might not agree with many of his political stands, and I still wish he’d buy a nice suit! Or even a nice golf shirt and a pressed pair of khakis! I can help you with that senator! But he has earned my respect. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com