On Monday, John Fetterman’s campaign desperately sought to lower expectations for their candidate when he faced off against Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz—even going so far as to suggest that.
John Fetterman’s campaign desperately sought to lower expectations for their candidate when he faced off against Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz—even going so far as to suggest that they expected Fetterman to lose.
I can assure you they didn’t lower expectations nearly enough.
I watched the entire debate, and I have to admit that I sometimes felt bad for Fetterman. I’m sure he expected to have bounced back from the stroke quicker and stronger than he has, but Tuesday night’s debate performance merely demonstrated just how far he has to go in his recovery. Without a doubt, Pennsylvania voters, and indeed the nation, saw firsthand that he is not capable of being a U.S. senator.
A condition of the debate was the allowance of a closed-captioning system to accommodate Fetterman’s cognitive impairments. The moderators were transparent about the system, but the system couldn’t help Fetterman articulate his positions clearly—at all.
From the beginning, it was clear that this was going to be a rough night for Fetterman, who opened up the debate by announcing, “Hi, goodnight, everybody.”
It got worse from there. “Hi, goodnight, everybody. I’m running to serve Pennsylvania. He’s running to use Pennsylvania. Here’s a man that spent more than $20 million of his own money to try to buy that seat. I’m also having to talk about something called ‘The Oz Rule,’ that if he’s on TV, he’s lying. He did that during his career on his TV show. He’s done that during his campaign about lying about… our record here,” Fetterman said, struggling to find the right words. “And he’s also lying probably during this debate. And let’s also talk about the elephant in the room. I had a stroke. He’s never let me forget that. And I might miss some words during this debate, mush two words together, but it knocked me down, but I’m going to keep coming back up.
