On the menu today: Last Friday, the campaign of Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman admitted that Fetterman, after being diagnosed with a heart condition, had stopped taking his medication and seeing any doctor for five years before he suffered a stroke in mid May — and that he “almost died” during his recent experience. Now Fetterman, his family, and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party need to have a hard, overdue conversation about what is in his best long-term interest. Meanwhile, the January 6 Commission debates straying very far from its mandate and calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College, and Joe Biden steps in to interrupt a Department of Commerce investigation into the origin of imported solar panels. Sometimes, you can just tell it’s a Monday.
The Hard Realities of Candidates’ Health
I completely relate to hesitation about going to see the doctor. Once you reach a certain age, you start to worry that your doctor might tell you that growth on your back, that intermittent headache, or that seemingly minor ache or pain might be a serious, life-threatening problem. As the late Norm Macdonald once joked, “If you’re getting old and your left arm doesn’t feel right, you either have an impending heart attack, or nothing at all will happen.”
I’m not going to say that John Fetterman’s past reluctance to see a doctor disqualifies him from serving in the U.S. Senate. But I will note that Pennsylvania Democrats who wonder if he is healthy enough to handle the rigors of a hard-fought Senate campaign and serve in the Senate are not being paranoid, and have good reason to feel betrayed by his initial explanation of his hospitalization, which was, at minimum, a lie of omission.
In 2017, Fetterman weighed 418 pounds. (The ideal weight for a 6′ 9″ man such as Fetterman is between 209 to 255 pounds.) Through diet and exercise, Fetterman lost 148 pounds in a year, and that is a real accomplishment.
But Friday afternoon, Fetterman’s cardiologist, Dr. Ramesh Chandra, issued a statement about Fetterman’s health history that included this shocking revelation:
I first saw John in 2017 at UPMC East. He was experiencing swelling in his feet and came to get it checked out. That is when I diagnosed him with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump. I had prescribed medications along with improved diet and exercise and asked him to follow up again in the following months. Instead, I did not see him again until yesterday. John did not go to any doctor for 5 years and did not continue taking his medications. [Emphasis added.]
“Decreased heart pump” appears to be a reference to cardiomyopathy, which causes the heart muscle to become enlarged, thick, or rigid, becoming less able to pump blood throughout the body and incapable of maintaining a normal electrical rhythm.
A 48-year-old, 400-pound man diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy stopped taking his heart medication and didn’t see a doctor for five years. John Fetterman is very lucky to be alive.
Chandra also wrote, “I do believe that he [Fetterman] is taking his recovery and his health very seriously this time, he should be able to campaign and serve in the U.S. Senate without a problem.”
Left, right, or center, we should all hope that Fetterman lives to be 100 and enjoys good health for the rest of his days.
But as the Washington Post summarized this weekend, “The politician, whose advisers have pitched him as an ‘authentic, straight-talking, no-B.S. populist’ — sporting a shaved pate, graying goatee and Carhartt sweatshirts — now faces the challenge of explaining the confusion to voters.”
It wasn’t really “confusion” so much as falsehood. Fetterman’s statement in mid May said that:
I had a stroke that was caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long. Fortunately, Gisele spotted the symptoms and got me to the hospital within minutes. The amazing doctors here were able to quickly and completely remove the clot, reversing the stroke, they got my heart under control as well. The good news is I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery. So I have a lot to be thankful for. They’re keeping me here for now for observation, but I should be out of here sometime soon.
On the night of his primary win, Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, described the situation as, “John had a little hiccup on Friday while we were campaigning. Thank God he’s already on the way to a full recovery.”
Almost immediately, cardiologists consulted by publications such as the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the decision to implant a defibrillator “would make sense only if he has a different condition that puts him at risk of sudden death, like cardiomyopathy — a weakened heart muscle” and that the “thrombectomy, the method likely used to remove the clot, also indicates that Mr. Fetterman experienced more than a tiny stroke.”
Fetterman remained in the hospital for eight days. Since suffering the stroke May 13, he has made no public appearances, other than his campaign releasing two short videos.
On Friday, Fetterman issued a new statement declaring that he “almost died” after his recent stroke, and that Post story reported that his “ability to have conversations rapidly has not fully recovered, though he is improving and doctors still predict a full recovery.”
Of all the topics a candidate can lie about, lying about personal health is one of the most futile, because sooner or later, the candidate’s body will generate some sort of counterevidence. The late Paul Tsongas is perhaps the most vivid example in recent history:
In 1992, Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas was one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination. He had been treated for a form of lymph-node cancer, or lymphoma, from 1983 to 1986, but when he ran in 1992, he declared himself “cured.” Tak Takvorian, Tsongas’s doctor at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told reporters, “I’m very confident that he’s fine.”
Tsongas won the New Hampshire primary but lost ground to Bill Clinton and withdrew from the race in March. It did not take long before it became clear that had he won the race, the best-case scenario was that the new president would have faced enormous challenges. In December 1992, he announced that a new growth in his abdomen was cancerous, and he underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He spent a good portion of the next four years in hospitals, dealing with complications from the treatment. Had Tsongas been elected in 1992, he would not have lived to the end of his first term: He died on January 18, 1997, two days before Clinton’s second inauguration.
Fetterman, his wife, his doctors, and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party must have an honest and blunt conversation about whether it is in his best interest to continue as the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate. The man just endured a near-death experience, and Senate campaigns can be a relentless and grueling ordeal for much younger and healthier candidates. I am sure representing the state of Pennsylvania for the next six years is important to everyone involved — but it’s not worth dying over. (It should also be noted that the Fettermans have three school-age children.)
A lesser concern, but one that is unavoidable, is whether this health emergency and the campaign’s less-than-fully honest initial explanation of it have weakened Fetterman’s strength as a candidate. It would be hard enough to downplay Fetterman’s health issues in an ordinary campaign, but he is running against one of the most famous doctors in America, a former cardiothoracic surgeon. This topic — and Fetterman’s reckless decision to not go to any doctor for five years, even while he was lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania — will come up, over and over again.
Finally, if you’re reading this and it feels a little familiar, go schedule that doctor’s appointment and get your checkup. Oftentimes, the fear of not knowing is worse than the pain of knowing. Once you know what you’re dealing with, you can put together a gameplan and feel a little more in control of your health and your life.
The January 6 Commission Wants to Rewrite the Constitution
The January 6 Commission was already going to have a hard time convincing Trump-friendly Republicans that it wasn’t on a partisan witch hunt. Axios reports that commission member and Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin wants the panel to formally recommend altering the Constitution to remove the Electoral College and switch to a national popular vote. Apparently, Wyoming Republican representative Liz Cheney is trying to convince him that’s a terrible idea. If the January 6 commission wants to marginalize itself as a bunch of left-wingers, offering the usual agitprop about how elections are unfair if Republicans win, they should embrace Raskin’s course.
Joe Biden Intervenes in a Department of Commerce Investigation
About a month ago, I noted that U.S. solar-energy projects have ground to a halt because apparently almost of them are using polysilicon that can be traced back to China, even though it is being moved through Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The argument of Silicon Valley-based Auxin Solar is that most of the U.S. solar industry is evading U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made solar cells and panels that are in the final stages of production by routing them through other Southeast Asian countries, and attempting to hide that they originated in China. If those U.S. companies were found to be in violation, those companies could get hit with retroactive tariffs that could add up to billions — and once the probe was announced, basically every solar panel importer in the U.S. stopped importing them. (Think that means they’re not 100 percent sure those cells and panels didn’t originate in China?)
This morning, President Biden declared, “never mind”:
President Joe Biden will declare a 24-month tariff exemption on Monday for solar panels from four Southeast Asian nations after an investigation froze imports and stalled projects in the United States, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The move comes amid concern about the impact of the Commerce Department’s months-long investigation into whether imports of solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are circumventing tariffs on goods made in China.
Sure, the U.S. solar industry is smiling this morning. But there’s a good chance Xi Jinping of China is smiling, too, as the U.S. is effectively announcing that its own tariffs on Chinese-produced solar panels are optional.
ADDENDUM: In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Liz Wolfe described what it was like to attempt to drive an electric car from New Orleans to Chicago and back, relying only on recharging stations. The result is hilarious, and a little terrifying: Apparently some electric batteries just don’t live up to the hype on recharging speed. The final score of the four-day weekend was 18 hours recharging, 16 hours sleeping.