Pennsylvanians were well acquainted with John Fetterman’s idiosyncrasies by the time he was elected to the U.S. Senate four years ago. No one had a right, for example, to expect him to report for Capitol Hill duty with a clean shave and a pressed suit.
His supporters do deserve to be dismayed, however, at their increasingly right-leaning senior senator’s self-indulgent recent threats to leave the Democratic Party entirely. Fetterman won a competitive race as a Democrat thanks to voters who believed in him and his politics even after a stroke forced him off the campaign trail for months. If they wanted a Republican senator, they could have voted for the crudité-shopping TV doctor Fetterman was running against, Mehmet Oz.
For a man who styles himself as such a Washington outsider that he can barely be bothered to put on a pair of long pants, Fetterman is making a very inside-the-Beltway mistake. Judging by his willingness to change his positions and party at a whim, he seems to think the Senate seat belongs to him rather than the people he represents.
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After nearly half the Democrats in the House voted against aid to Israel recently, Fetterman said he would leave the party should it incorporate such opposition into its platform and “officially become the anti-Israel party.” That makes his inconstancy sound more high-minded than it really is.
While the vote represented a high-water mark of Democratic opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, there is no sign Fetterman suddenly finds himself in a party that believes Israel “doesn’t deserve to exist,” as the senator put it. Nearly 100 Democratic representatives took the pro-Israel side of the same vote, after all.
Nor is this some inexplicable or unforeseeable about-face on the part of Fetterman’s fellow Democrats in Congress. The party’s lawmakers are only beginning to catch up with public dismay at the conduct of Israel’s hard-right regime. One recent poll found that about a third of American adults, including a similar share of Jewish Americans and half of Democrats, believe Israeli forces committed genocide in Gaza.
The Netanyahu government, which launched its campaign against Hamas in Gaza after the horrific terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, has vociferously deflected that suggestion. In a statement last week, the prime minister’s office said that “Israel has taken unprecedented wartime measures to minimize harm to civilians while confronting Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that uses Palestinians as human shields and deliberately targets innocent Israeli civilians.”
Even if Fetterman’s stated pro-Israel principles are accepted at face value, moreover, they don’t account for the extent of his ideological migration. Perhaps his defense of Israel can be stretched to explain his avid and anomalous support for President Donald Trump’s unpopular and unsuccessful war in Iran.
But the senator has also voted for Republican measures to fund Trump’s immigration crackdown, supported his billion-dollar ballroom, objected to fewer cabinet nominees than any other Democrat, and signed off on one of Trump’s judicial nominations, the first in his caucus to do so this term. (Despite backing those initiatives, Fetterman says that his internal metrics show he votes with his party 93% of the time.)
He has also become a Fox News fixture who has accused the Democratic base — the people who, you know, gave him his job — of being “anti-American.” No wonder he is polling better among the state’s Republicans than the GOP’s own senator from Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick.
Despite Fetterman’s proclaimed “moral clarity” on Israel, he often speaks of his grievances with his fellow partisans — and his appreciation for Trump — in political rather than policy terms. He has groused about the repercussions of left-leaning Democrats’ positions for swing-state politicians like him, enthused about Trump’s sheer political talent, and lamented the electoral fate of Democrat Bob Casey, his former Senate colleague.
Maybe the senator’s red shift is motivated less by foreign policy than by an impulse to keep his job — even if it means betraying his voters. In that case, he should at least do his former supporters the courtesy of refraining from dressing up his careerism as morality.
Fetterman
