A few months ago, I wrote an open letter to the American press in which I proposed that nobody really believed its pretense that John Fetterman was mostly fine, that nobody really believed that there would be no significant effects on his health if he were to run for office during his recovery period, and that nobody really believed that it was “ableist” to suggest that he should not be elected as a result of his condition:
This is Joe Biden’s “stutter” all over again. As with Fetterman, that defensive narrative didn’t work because we could all see it was nonsense. Sure, you can get away with gaslighting the deputy HR director you use to settle your scores at work, but you can’t gaslight voters who have access to before-and-after videos and honest before-and-after accounts, not to mention critics who’ll tell them the truth. We know what Joe Biden was like in 2000, and we know what he’s like now. We know what John Fetterman was like in 2015, and we know what he’s like now. We are capable of watching the new broadcasts you’re trying to undermine, and of processing the words written by the journalists you’re trying to cajole, and we can see that they are highly alarming.
I was right. Here’s the New York Times today:
Mr. Fetterman, 53, the 6-foot-8, tattooed and goateed Democrat from Pennsylvania who suffered a near-fatal stroke last May and went on to win one of the most competitive seats in November’s midterm elections, was never going to blend in seamlessly in the marbled corridors of Congress.
But his adjustment to serving in the Senate has been made vastly more difficult by the strains of his recovery, which left him with a physical impairment and serious mental health challenges that have rendered the transition extraordinarily challenging — even with the accommodations that have been made to help him adapt.
How bad is it?
The most evident disability is a neurological condition that impairs his hearing. Mr. Fetterman suffers from auditory processing issues, forcing him to rely primarily on a tablet to transcribe what is being said to him. The hearing issues are inconsistent; they often get worse when he is in a stressful or unfamiliar situation. When it’s bad, Mr. Fetterman has described it as trying to make out the muffled voice of the teacher in the “Peanuts” cartoon, whose words could never be deciphered.
Was it, perhaps, the case that running for office made Fetterman’s health permanently worse, as some suggested it inevitably would? Yes, yes it was:
He has had to come to terms with the fact that he may have set himself back permanently by not taking the recommended amount of rest during the campaign. And he continues to push himself in ways that people close to him worry are detrimental.
What should Fetterman have done? Well:
“What you’re supposed to do to recover from this is do as little as possible,” said Adam Jentleson, his chief of staff. Instead, Mr. Fetterman “was forced to do as much as possible — he had to get back to the campaign trail. It’s hard to claw that back.”
“Forced”? Forced by whom? At the time, I wrote that “John Fetterman ought to drop out of the Senate race on the grounds that he is unable to do the job for which he is running.” Many others said the same. Nobody “forced” John Fetterman to stay in the race and decline to do what he was “supposed” to. Nobody could have forced John Fetterman to do that. Fetterman’s doing so was a choice — a choice that was defended on the grounds that his ailment was merely temporary, and that, by the time he got to the Senate, it would be better.
Which wasn’t true — as we all knew at the time.