John Fetterman, Fox News, and Phantom Menace Derangement Syndrome

Somewhere along the way, the clothes became the least weird thing about John Fetterman.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

There was a time when John Fetterman was the guy Democrats wheeled out whenever they wanted to prove the party still contained at least one person who looked like he knew how to change a tire. Six foot eight, hoodie, cargo shorts, tattoos marking the dates of homicides in Braddock, married to an undocumented immigrant who became an American citizen, living across from a shuttered steel mill because apparently subtlety was never part of the branding.

Fetterman was sold as the anti-politician politician, the Everyman Democrat, the guy who supposedly understood Pennsylvania because he looked less like somebody running for the Senate than somebody you might ask to help move a refrigerator. And for a few years, roughly 2019 through his Senate run in 2022, MSNBC absolutely loved the man. For somebody whose appeal was that he wasn’t some polished cable-news creature, Fetterman spent an impressive amount of time sitting under studio lights explaining politics to cable-news audiences.

He made the rounds: Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Ali Velshi, basically the MSNBC Avengers lineup. And it worked because Fetterman understood the character he was playing. He wasn’t supposed to sound like another consultant-manufactured Democrat who had memorized seventeen ways to say “working families.” He was the giant dude from western Pennsylvania in a hoodie telling liberals that, yes, Trumpism was insane, but also that Democrats had better stop talking about places like Braddock as though they’d only discovered them during a New York Times diner safari. MSNBC got its blue-collar whisperer, Fetterman got national exposure, and everybody went home happy. Whatever I think of the man now, I’ll give him this much: the gimmick was excellent, and for a while he played the hell out of it.

Then Republicans nominated Mehmet Oz, which was less like running an opponent against Fetterman than presenting him with a federally funded comedy grant. Oz didn’t live in Pennsylvania in any meaningful sense of the word. He had spent years using Oprah’s credibility as starter fluid for a television empire where he promoted raspberry ketones, green coffee bean extract, and assorted miracle-weight-loss nonsense until Elizabeth Warren hauled him before the Senate and asked, in considerably more senatorial language, why the hell he kept selling people bullshit.

Then came the grocery-store video. Oz wandered through the produce section gathering ingredients for what he called a “crudité,” because apparently “vegetable tray” was unavailable in whatever dialect wealthy New Jersey television doctors speak, while also mangling the name of the store. Fetterman’s campaign saw that gift falling from heaven, clipped it, mocked him mercilessly, and turned Oz ordering raw vegetables like Louis XIV into one of the defining jokes of the race. It was devastating because it confirmed everything Fetterman wanted Pennsylvania voters to believe: Oz wasn’t merely rich or out of touch; he looked like an alien who had been briefed on working-class humans five minutes before filming began. If you were a Democrat in Pennsylvania in 2022, you voted for Fetterman. Of course you did. The alternative was Dr. Oz wandering around Pennsylvania asking the peasants where they kept the crudité.

That wasn’t some great moral puzzle. Fetterman roasted the hell out of him for it, correctly, and Pennsylvania voters finished the job. Knowing everything I know about Fetterman now, I still don’t blame anybody for making that choice. Hell, given those two options, I’d make the same calculation again.

That doesn’t mean Fetterman arrived in the general election wrapped in saintly white linen. In 2013, as mayor of Braddock, he heard what he believed were gunshots, grabbed a shotgun, jumped in his truck, chased down a Black jogger named Christopher Miyares, and detained him until police arrived and established that Miyares was unarmed and had done nothing wrong. Fetterman says he never pointed the weapon at him. Miyares says he did. Either way, chasing an unarmed Black man down the street with a shotgun is not exactly the sort of anecdote you put on the campaign brochure between “supports unions” and “likes Sheetz.” Under different circumstances, that incident might have ended his political career. Maybe Democratic primary voters should have interrogated it a hell of a lot harder. But by November 2022, the choice was already made, and the other guy was Dr. Crudité. Fetterman won because, whatever his baggage, Republicans somehow found the one man in America capable of making him look normal.