Politics Outweigh Competence for Many Voters

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman takes the stage at an election night party in Pittsburgh on Nov. 9, 2022. Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo

Commentary

John Fetterman’s return to the U.S. Senate on April 17 after a two-month stay in hospital for depression (following a stroke last summer) brought back disputes concerning this figure’s competence.

Having listened to Republican politicians complaining about Fetterman’s absence from his job, I must wonder about the genuineness of their concern. Fetterman will now likely do exactly what his Pennsylvanian supporters expect of him, which is to vote consistently with the left.

And why should Fetterman’s disabled state be a surprise to his voters? They knew what they were getting in the matter of his health when they elected him. Finally, do the Republicans who have griped about Fetterman not serving his constituents really want to have liberal Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro replace him? As should be obvious, Shapiro would replace Fetterman with a more energetic Democrat, one who would unfailingly vote with President Joe Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Fetterman’s voters could already assess the extent of his deteriorated condition when they observed him as a candidate. Anyone who watched his debate with his Republican contender, Mehmet Oz, on Oct. 25, shortly before the election, knew that he suffered from a devastating brain injury. His responses to the questions asked by the moderators were quite incoherent, even with the special electronic devices that he was allowed to use to process what he was being asked.

Indeed, Fetterman’s advocates thundered against the apparently unfair qualification that a candidate should be “able” to perform all his expected functions in order to be elected to public office. The liberal media went after “ableism” as a right-wing trick intended to keep the morally pure Fetterman from standing up in Washington for women, blacks, and LGBT advocates.

Even more significantly, Fetterman’s numerous fans prevailed. Despite the candidate’s seriously impaired mental and physical condition, he beat his moderate Republican opponent, a longtime TV celebrity and smooth talker, by 4.9 points.

Although one might dispute some of the precinct returns from our major PA cities, our senator’s winning margin is nothing to sneeze at. Fetterman won in a walkaway, despite the apparent problems that his party faced, problems that Democrats helped create on the national level, from rising criminal violence and an overrun southern border to alarming inflation rates. Fetterman wasn’t even discernably hurt by his repeated calls to stop drilling for natural gas, an industry that entire counties in Western PA depend on for their livelihood.

The political reasons that Fetterman won were of such overriding importance to his voters that they happily waved aside other considerations. His demand for unrestricted abortion rights, his call for releasing more criminals from jail, his advocacy of government-run centers for shooting up drugs, and his staunch advocacy of LGBT issues all made the Democratic candidate attractive to a majority of those who cast votes in Pennsylvania last year. And there’s no reason that Fetterman’s health problems would cause him to abandon any of the positions on which he ran, and which his handlers, most vocally his wife Gisele, promised he would promote.

Fetterman’s condition may not matter in a state like mine, in which Democrats last year elected a dead man as a state representative. Partisan loyalties outweigh other considerations for many voters. Fetterman’s comfortable win, let’s be clear, had nothing to do with his intellectual abilities relative to those of Oz. An ideologically driven agenda allowed Democrats in Pennsylvania to elect a cognitively impaired candidate, without apparently agonizing over his health condition. Dr. Oz, by contrast, lost his race because he couldn’t excite his base by appealing to deep conviction.

Although on record as being pro-life, Oz muted his opposition to abortion throughout his race and tried desperately to get out of the way of the feminist juggernaut. He placed his hope on bread-and-butter issues and focused with special care on Fetterman’s opposition to drilling for natural gas. In the end, nothing helped him, because the experienced TV star was no match for the embattled and well-financed crusaders on the other side.

The only way Republicans can hope to win, besides forcing the Democrats to adhere to stricter electoral procedures, including voter identification, is to do better on the ideological front. Running conflict-averse centrist candidates is no answer to what the Democrats can do. Democrats trounce Republicans, as they showed in Fetterman’s case, by fighting ideological battles from the left.

Although Republicans may prefer talking about budgets, the need for a larger military, and having “suitable” candidates, they’ll need to do something emotionally more compelling to win, particularly in purplish states turning blue. And they’ll have to find their own crusaders, on the right, in large enough numbers to achieve that goal.

Democrats have no interest in making elections about “ableism.” Moreover, next year they’ll likely engage in another no-holds-barred ideological crusade to get a mentally diminished president reelected. They'll go back to the playbook with which they won so handily in Pennsylvania.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.