Words we don’t use in the same sentence these days are “common sense” and “Democrats.”
Whether we’re talking about biological men competing against women in sports or going to bat for alleged MS-13 gang members accused of human trafficking, the Blue Team appears to have lost all sense of sanity.
But one lawmaker in the party has surprisingly stood out: Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). The towering 55-year-old has been unwavering in his support for Israel and unrelenting in attacking Hamas and its supporters. Before President Donald Trump secured the border, he went against his own party in talking about the need for better border security and working with the GOP. And he has actually called on more Democrats to consider speaking and working with Trump on issues where there may be common ground.
Example: Fetterman met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in January, telling the ladies of The View that he was “cordial” and “kind.”
“I think, overall, it was a positive experience,” Fetterman recalled. “I mean, he was kind. He was cordial. It wasn’t any kind of theater. It wasn’t trying to get your picture taken to put something out on social media. It was really just a conversation.”
“If you’re a senator from a critical state and the president would like to have a conversation, that’s part of our responsibility,” he recently told New York magazine.
“His faculties haven’t slipped at all,” he also observed. “It’s not that I admire it — I acknowledge it, and if you don’t, you do it at your own peril politically.”
It’s this kind of reasonable, mature rhetoric that has rankled many Democrats and their allies in the media, who much prefer to resist Trump on everything, even issues that 80% of the public supports.
Another example: Do you believe people should be required to present identification to vote? According to a Pew Research Center survey, 81% of people support that requirement. So, what did Democrats do when voting on a voter ID bill?
All but four of 212 House Democrats voted against it, and it will not get enough Democratic votes to get to 60 in the Senate.
“Democrats and Americans see this bill for what it really is: a nasty, vicious attack on our democracy,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said when declaring the legislation “dead on arrival” in the Senate. “It’s very reminiscent of Jim Crow.”
But Fetterman is still bucking the party and is often alone in doing so. He was the only Democrat to vote to confirm Attorney General Pam Bondi. He was the only Democrat to vote to confirm Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. He voted along with eight other Democrats to keep the government open to avert a shutdown in March. He is also more hawkish on military action than many Republicans.
“Waste that s***,” he said in a recent interview regarding Iran’s nuclear facilities. “You’re never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
Fetterman’s stances and votes have captured the ire of the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a media darling and possible 2028 presidential contender who has targeted him specifically for voting to keep the government open when most Democrats voted to shut it down out of blind opposition to Trump.
“I hope you can relay how little I care about her views on this,” he shot back.
That kind of blunt retort is notable because no one in the party would ever dare to speak to the next Evita that way.
Enter New York magazine, which has morphed into the written version of MSNBC meets the Lincoln Project.
Headline: The Hidden Struggle of John Fetterman.
Sub-headline: John Fetterman insists he is in good health. But staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.
“Most of the staffers I spoke with are angry,” wrote Ben Terris, the magazine’s Washington correspondent. “They are troubled. And they are sad. These were some of Fetterman’s truest believers, and they now question his fitness to be a senator. They worry he may present a risk to the Democratic Party and maybe even to himself.”
So, who are these current staffers? We’ll never know, because just like every political hit piece, these allegations are based on anonymous sources.
But here’s where things get both nefarious and obvious: A letter written by former Fetterman chief of staff Adam Jentleson to Walter Reed Medical Center regarding his concern for the senator’s health was miraculously leaked to New York magazine, which was then echoed by the New York Times and the New Republic.
Who could have possibly leaked such a thing?
Fetterman, for his part, knows the answer to this almost-rhetorical question, simply dismissing the concern as the product of “disgruntled ex-staffers.”
Terris proceeded to run through various unverifiable anecdotes of staffers talking about how concerned they suddenly were for Fetterman, a concern that didn’t exist when he ran for Senate in 2022 with control of the Senate in the balance, standing at a 50-50 split at the time.
Achieving a clear Democratic majority in the chamber meant downplaying and dismissing Fetterman’s obvious difficulties at the time following a massive stroke earlier that year.
After months off the campaign trail in the spring and summer, Fetterman emerged a shell of himself, with his motor skills and speech impaired. And the ability to even have small talk with one NBC News reporter, Dasha Burns, was difficult for him, according to her.
At the time, this kind of objective reporting was lambasted by members of the press because, well … there was an election that needed to be won, journalism be damned.
Associated Press: NBC reporter’s comment about Fetterman draws criticism
Mediaite: Stroke-Survivor Journo Leads Backlash Against NBC’s Dasha Burns Reporting On Computer-Aided Fetterman Interview
The Independent: Kara Swisher shuts down ‘nonsense’ claims that John Fetterman couldn’t follow conversation
That was then, this is now. Fetterman was indispensable in 2022. He was reliably liberal and therefore could never be seen as going rogue. But now that it’s actually happening, suddenly the party has deemed him quite expendable, hence the flimsy New York magazine piece that just came out of nowhere.
Speaking of that piece, here’s the conclusion Terris conveniently puts at the very end of the story.
“I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote.
So if that’s the case, why write the story? Unless there was a preplanned narrative going in, of course.
It’s safe to say Fetterman will not go quietly. In fact, given the way he’s been treated by his own party, perhaps he’ll follow the route of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who also was mistreated and lied about by Democrats during her run for president in 2020 — Hillary Clinton accused her of being a Russian agent.
Pro-Israel. Pro-border security. Open to working with a sitting Republican president.
These positions and this willingness used to be fairly common in Washington.
Now it’s absolutely the exception.
And those who follow this road of common sense can expect to have no home in the Democratic Party.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
