By Rich
Lowry
Thursday,
October 27, 2022
The Fetterman
apologists are out in force trying to explain away what we saw on Tuesday
night.
They are
making several arguments:
(1) It’s
very admirable how transparent he was by showing up for the debate.
“Some
recognized the
feat that it was for Fetterman to not only publicly recover from a stroke but
chose to participate in a nationally televised debate and the decision may have
actually boosted his Senate campaign,” according
to Slate.
“Even with all the discourse, it’s worth noting that within three hours of
Tuesday night’s debate, Fetterman
raised $1 million.
In fact, he has pretty consistently raised more
money than Oz during their senate bid. Perhaps his own bet—that being transparent
about his incredibly common health struggle—is the strategically sound approach
after all.”
Others
have praised Fetterman for having the “courage” to recover publicly.
This is
preposterous. Fetterman hasn’t been transparent in the least. He was secretive
about the details of his stroke when the event happened and notably declined on
Tuesday night to commit to making public his medical records. All we’ve gotten
from him is a letter from a friendly doctor who clearly sugarcoated his
condition.
He
himself has lied about how the stroke has affected him, saying he only flubs a
word here or there. When NBC reporter Dasha Burns reported, accurately, on his
difficulty understanding her, the campaign didn’t take it as an opportunity to
be courageously transparent — they, to the contrary, savaged Burns.
Then,
there’s the fact that the only reason that Fetterman got on the debate stage at
all is that Oz browbeat him into it. Fetterman and his team realized it’d be
too politically risky to continue to dodge. They still put off the debate as
long as they could to bank as much of the early vote as possible
before voters saw him in action — a cynical maneuver to squeeze every bit
of benefit from his lack of transparency prior to having to perform in front of
a large audience of Pennsylvanians.
(2)
Fetterman was held to an unfair “ableist” standard.
A Washington
Post report noted, “The debate not only
put Fetterman’s cognitive challenges and need for accommodation on full public
display, say disability advocates, but it revealed the ableism inherent in the
electoral process and the added scrutiny that candidates with disabilities
receive compared with their non-disabled counterparts.”
But it’s
not unfair to expect a candidate for a job that requires prodigious amounts of
talking and listening to be able to do both, especially when the candidate has
represented himself as being able to communicate with minimal problems. This
isn’t the same thing as a voter allowing sheer prejudice to prevent him or her
from voting for, say, Tammy Duckworth or Greg Abbott.
Rather
than being under “added scrutiny,” Fetterman just needed to clear a minimal bar
and couldn’t do it.
(3)
People were outraged that Fetterman used closed captioning.
“On a
more serious note,” Dan Pfeiffer writes, “you can easily imagine someone with a
disability, who wants to serve their country in an elected office, seeing the
deeply ignorant and bigoted commentary and deciding it’s simply not worth it.
If these reporters are aghast that Fetterman may use closed captioning, wait
until someone wants to use a sign language interpreter.”
Uh, no.
People weren’t aghast at the accommodation made for Fetterman; they were aghast
that, despite the accommodation, he performed so poorly.
And it
wasn’t just pausing, which is understandable when reading captions — it was the
basic incoherence of some of his answers.
This
answer is not a captioning problem.
The
advantage of the debate is that, notwithstanding all the hiding of the ball by
the press and the Fetterman campaign in the months prior and the spin in the
immediate aftermath, it let voters see and decide for themselves.
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