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John Fetterman is skipping this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, to hear it from him, it has nothing—literally nothing—to do with him scotch-taping photos of the Israeli hostages to his Senate office walls. Or attacking fellow Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for falsely blaming a hospital bombing in Gaza on Israel. (“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza. Who would take the word of a group that just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our key ally?”) Or comparing the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia to a neo-Nazi rally (“Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students,” he tweeted). Nor is it about “Fetterman Alumni for Peace”—a group of former Fetterman campaign staffers—publicly scolding their old boss: “It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history.” “I’ve got three young kids, and they’re out of school,” the Pennsylvania senator said of his absence this week in Chicago, waving off the suggestion that he might not be welcome there. “That’s four days I can spend with my children.”The choice to skip the convention “was made well before that debate,” Fetterman told me in a one-hour conversation ...Once upon a time, in 2022, John Fetterman was a symbol of Rust Belt cool. He was bald and hulking at six-foot-eight, and he had a goatee and tats and a surly demeanor, and he was pro-choice, and he supported LGBTQIA+ rights. He pointed toward a future in which the Democrats could become, once again, the party of the working class—the voters they had been hemorrhaging for years. The Beautiful People loved Fetterman: The actress Kerry Washington endorsed him. So did Padma Lakshmi and John Legend. So did Oprah Winfrey—even though Winfrey had helped launch the television career of Fetterman’s Trump-backed Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.These days, not so much. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested, in May, that Fetterman is a bully. ...He said he thought that anyone, Democrat or Republican, who was not rooting for Israel and Ukraine had succumbed to a weakness of spirit or confusion or tribalism. ...
Trump's wanting to play "king maker" in PA with Oz cost us that seat. Fettermush is playing the moderate card right now, but he'll be a compliant socialist when it counts.
