If there’s one thing Democrats can always count on at election time, it’s the media coming to the rescue with a glossy magazine cover story that reads like it was written by the candidate’s PR team.
New York Magazine has just published a puff piece about John Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, that’s clearly meant to help his faltering campaign.
Trigger warning – cringe incoming:
The Vulnerability of John FettermanEven before John Fetterman became the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat — one of the pivotal few that could flip from Republican control — he had attained folkloric stature. He was six-foot-eight, bald, bearded, and almost always in a hoodie. He had a Harvard postgraduate degree and a home in a converted auto dealership across from a steel mill in Braddock, the struggling former steel town in western Pennsylvania where he had been mayor from 2006 to 2019.An enormous white man who had played offensive tackle in college and appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory, Fetterman made arguments for a higher minimum wage and prison reform and abortion access and legalizing weed at a frequency that could be heard by Rust Belt voters, and he had been regularly reelected mayor of his majority-Black town before becoming lieutenant governor. He was a Democrat who defied the right-wing caricatures of the contemporary left as elite, effete, and out of touch because he was self-evidently none of those things.Political reporters were gobsmacked; they’d never seen anyone like him before. Sure, on some level, he was exactly the same as every other senator in Pennsylvania history, a white man. But he wore shorts in January!
The Twitter promotion of the article is even cringier:
The article even cites Media Matters:
The reason for this article is obvious. Oz is closing in on Fetterman, and the media is worried.
Salena Zito writes in the New York Post:
Recently, his months on the road have started to pay off. With just one month to go before Election Day on Nov. 8, in one of the most important seats in the country, this race is now a squeaker. The most recent RealClearPolitics polling average shows Fetterman’s once-massive lead over Oz has shrunk to a statistical tie, and the Cook Political Report is now calling the race a toss-up.Sitting on a worn couch in a Philadelphia banquet hall, Oz is dressed in a navy suit and appears to be calm under pressure. He insists that his trip from the bottom of the polls to a near tie hasn’t rattled him.“It really humbles you,” he said, “when you meet people in their backyards, or on their farms, or in their neighborhoods and hear them talk about the things their communities need and how deeply it concerns them when those needs aren’t met. And it also has energized me. These conversations remind me how important it is to serve people’s needs, to really listen, and stay connected to them — and not Washington — if I am elected to the Senate.”While Oz was busy building relationships with voters, Fetterman built his following on Twitter. He mocked Oz for where he used to live (New Jersey), for what kind of shoes he supposedly wears (Gucci loafers), for calling a veggie tray “crudité.” Snooki from MTV’s “Jersey Shore” was even enlisted to tease Oz.
This is one of the races to watch in November. It’s more competitive than Democrats expected it to be, and if Oz pulls out a win, the meltdown on the left will be epic.
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