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Back during the 2020 election campaign, when the right were gleefully hooting that Democrat candidate John Fetterman was a vegetable, I wasn’t buying it.
Now, I was far from a fan of Fetterman at first. He came across as a work-shy trust-fund kid who’d decided politics was the easy road to a life-long grift. But he was up against someone even worse: sleazy Oprah-alumnus snake-oil salesman, Dr Oz. Hell, if you’ve got to catch a clap, genital warts are, after all, a slightly less vile prospect than terminal syphilis.
But, per ardua ad astra, Fetterman’s catastrophic stroke appeared to be the making of the man.
Where rightists en masse hooted and jeered at Fetterman as a ‘potato’, I saw someone struggling bravely with a devastating medical blow, and coming out on top. Just as a young Gene Simmons knew, when he was mocked by other kids for not speaking English when his mother moved him to America, not being able to communicate doesn’t make someone stupid. When Fetterman used his keyboard device to answer interviewer questions – his stroke had affected his verbal ability badly – he came across as thoughtful and articulate.
Suddenly, I was inclined to admire the man as a human being, if not as a Democrat.
In office, though, he’s proven himself to be singularly admirable as a modern Democrat. His legislative record – and he’s introduced a surprising number of bills for a junior senator – is mixed, but mostly of the sort of centrist persuasion that right-leaning voters should be celebrating as a sane alternative to the far-left delirium that’s infected the Democrats over the last decade.
As David Cole writes, the Republicans are just lucky that the Democrats haven’t twigged to “just how unstoppable a ‘1994 Democrat’ would be today, especially in city and state elections”.
By “1994 Democrat” I meant a Dem who’s tough on crime, against open borders, and not into the tranny shit (which wasn’t even an issue in ’94) while still being pro-choice.
As Cole wrote, last year:
Should Democrats ever realize that going back to that 1994 vibe would be an ultimate stake through the heart of a GOP that’s dying among swing voters thanks to Trumpism on one end and pro-life extremism on the other, GOP losses would be profound, and that’s saying a lot considering how substantial those losses have already been over the past five years.
And guess what? John Fetterman got the memo. Not necessarily from me, because the point I was making was actually one of my most obvious. So obvious, in fact, that even a man recovering from a stroke could grasp it.
From open crime and open borders, to China and Israel, “even daring to mention the genocide of whites in South Africa”, Fetterman has proved to be an admirable antidote to a Democratic party that has deserted its working-class base in order to pander to the gibbering delusions of the coastal elites.
And voters are taking note.
Fetterman’s become, according to polls, “the most popular senator in America,” with a 76 per cent approval rating (and only seven per cent disapproval).
Sure, Fetterman’s a leftist – but he’s the sort of sensible, centre-leftist that we used to be able to get along with (and which many of us once were, before the far-left shifted the ground under our feet).
After Fetterman defiantly told NBC News, “I am not a progressive,” he became a target of Pennsylvania’s far-leftists, who feel “betrayed.” Because yeah, in his earlier years, Fetterman seemed to be one of them. But then he had the “1994 Democrat epiphany.” Just a week ago Fetterman told the NY Post that “the progressives left me.” Police defunding, open borders, Hamas…he didn’t betray them, they betrayed him.
Takimag
As a former Labor voter, I know just what he means. Many Liberal and National voters in Australia and New Zealand would no doubt feel just the same way.
If only someone, anyone, on either side of politics in Aus or NZ, was capable of learning the same lesson.
