On the menu today: Tonight is the first and only Senate debate night in Pennsylvania; former president Barack Obama has a curious way of helping out his old running mate; and progressive House Democrats write to President Biden, telling him it’s time to negotiate with Vladimir Putin and give Putin what he wants in exchange for ending the war in Ukraine.
Debate Night in Pennsylvania
For Pennsylvanians, tonight brings the lone debate between Senate candidates John Fetterman, the Democrat, and Mehmet Oz, the Republican. The debate begins at 8 p.m. from the WHTM studios in Harrisburg, and WHTM news anchor Dennis Owens and WPXI anchor Lisa Sylvester will serve as moderators. The Washington Post laid out the measures that will be in place to help with Fetterman’s auditory-processing issues:
According to ABC27, the local TV station hosting the debate, real-time captions will transcribe everything the moderators and Oz say, but they will not transcribe Fetterman’s words. ABC27 reporter Dennis Owens, who will be one of the moderators, aired a segment that showed two large TV screens that will hang over the moderators. The screens will features text of what’s being said in real time. Oz and Fetterman will be standing on a stage at the debate behind lecterns.
The candidates will have 60 seconds to answer questions, 30 seconds for rebuttals and 15 seconds for any clarification, according to a person familiar with the debate rules who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the details. The candidates are allowed to have with them one 8 x 10 notebook, a black ballpoint pen and water. If a candidate is attacked, the moderator will decide whether to allow him the chance to respond.
The past months have shown that Fetterman is capable of getting through a speech with minimal stumbles. C-SPAN aired this “Women for Fetterman” rally in Blue Bell, Pa., on September 11; Fetterman spoke for about eleven or twelve minutes. (This is the “My name is John Fetterwoman” rally.) He’ll pause every now and then while speaking a sentence, or say something like, “I hope you don’t have a doctor in your life who’s telling you that you’re not fit to be serve.” But minor errors like those probably won’t be enough to persuade a majority of Pennsylvania voters that Fetterman is physically incapable of serving as a U.S. senator.
But delivering a version of your stump speech before an adoring crowd is different, and easier, than answering questions with time limits. Oz’s big-time television career began with Oprah Winfrey in 2004, and he’s probably as comfortable in front of the camera as any person alive. The challenge for Oz will be to try to provoke missteps by Fetterman, without looking like he’s trying to provoke missteps by Fetterman.
The challenge for the Democratic nominee may be stamina; tonight’s debate is an hour long. Also, if an ordinary candidate gets tongue-tied, mixes up words, or verbally missteps, it’s just an off night. For Fetterman, if the bad moments add up over the course of the hour, voters at home may conclude that he and his campaign have continued to hide how slowly he’s recovering from his stroke — and his campaign didn’t agree to another debate to undo any damage from a bad performance; his campaign put all its eggs into the basket of tonight. Then again, some may suspect that the Fetterman campaign had good reason to agree to only one debate so late in the campaign.
As of yesterday, 556,441 Pennsylvanians had already cast ballots in the 2022 elections. At last count, 407,007 are registered Democrats, 107,039 are registered Republicans, and 42,395 are registered with other or no parties. My guess is that registered Democrats are likely to give Fetterman every benefit of the doubt on his recovery, so I doubt you will find many Pennsylvanians who watch the debate tonight and regret casting their vote early.
Someone dropped a detailed summary of political-ad spending nationwide as of Friday, October 21, in my hands, and that summary reveals Pennsylvania is the state that has seen and will see the most spending on advertising this cycle, with an astounding $162 million either spent so far or slated to be spent on ads between now and Election Day. Since the end of the primaries, Democrats have accounted for $67.6 million of that total and Republicans have accounted for $54.6 million. In the month of October, Democrats are set to outspend Republicans $48 million to $32 million. In the month of October, Democrats are slated to outspend Republicans $48 million to $32 million.
And yet, the race is getting closer, instead of Fetterman pulling away. You figure that at some point, the airwaves get saturated with ads, and voters start to tune them out during the commercial breaks. After a while, it’s all the same gravelly voiced announcers, unflattering black-and-white photos of the opposition, scary stock photos, and stock footage of small-town America. In most cases, earned media, in the form of news coverage about the candidate, outweighs paid media, in the form of commercials and advertisements. And one way or another, tonight will generate a lot of earned media.
Former President Obama Is Helping . . . Someone
If you don’t watch Monday Night Football, ESPN runs the “ManningCast,” a game simulcast hosted by brothers and former NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning, with a rotating cast of guests and a lot of jokes and stories and varying amounts of attention paid to the game in front of them. Last night, as the Chicago Bears crushed the New England Patriots, former president Barack Obama was the guest — and as expected, he made a get-out-the-vote pitch, but some of the points he chose to emphasize were a little curious.
“Don’t pass up your opportunity to participate, because if you’re unhappy with the way things are, the good news is, the way our system is set up, you can actually bring about some change,” Obama said. He also said that, “Every election is important in a democracy. . . . You’ve got all kinds of issues from jobs, the economy, climate change . . . that is essentially on the ballot because you’re deciding who’s going to speak for you, and you should make sure that somebody actually cares about you.”
First, I’m not sure the DNC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee want Obama going on national television and telling people that if they’re unhappy with the way things are, they should go cast ballots for change. Second, in a year when Democratic candidates are emphasizing abortion, January 6, and Donald Trump, I wonder how they feel about Obama listing off “jobs and the economy” as the first issue atop his mind.
There have always been signs that the Obama–Biden relationship was a little more complicated and prickly than either man pretended it was in public, with stories indicating that each one felt the other had been insufficiently respectful or deferential at times. It is difficult to believe that Obama’s “change”/”economy” messaging when reminding people to vote in the midterms was entirely accidental.
Progressives Suddenly Aren’t So Supportive of Fighting Russia in Ukraine
Hey, remember from 2016 to 2020, when just about every Democrat saw Vladimir Putin as the root of all evil, almost every Republican was accused of being in cahoots with the Russian government, and even staid establishment voices like the Brookings Institution warned that “the GOP became the party of Putin”? Remember how that overwhelming wave of (largely justified) hostility to the Putin regime started just four years after Obama’s “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back” attack on Mitt Romney?
You’re going to need a neck brace for whiplash again, because 30 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, have written to Biden, saying, “We urge you to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority.”
Of course, any negotiated settlement will allow Russia to keep the territory it has annexed. There is no way that Putin fought this war, with perhaps 68,000 Russian soldiers killed and another 205,000 wounded, just so he could give back all the territory his forces conquered. And there is no “new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine.” You might as well wish for a demilitarized zone enforced by peacekeeping elves and dwarves mounted on unicorns. Putin has made his position clear; in fact, he can’t make it much clearer. These House progressives are imagining a much more reasonable, conciliatory, and nicer Putin who’s willing to let bygones be bygones and who earnestly wants peace — a Putin who doesn’t exist.
Anyway, after four years of every wing of the Democratic Party denouncing Putin in the most furious terms . . . now, after he’s invaded a sovereign neighbor and slaughtered God knows how many innocent civilians, now the progressives want to sit down and negotiate with him?
Shortly after the letter was released, some of the House Democrats ran away from the letter they had signed. Marc Pocan of Wisconsin said it was outdated: “Not sure why it’s dated 10/24 as it was from July.” (Er, it’s not like Putin was a nicer, more trustworthy, or less barbaric guy in July.) Over in Politico’s Playbook newsletter, one member of the House Democratic leadership fumed, “Vladimir Putin would have signed that letter if asked. That bone-headed letter just put Dems in the same league as Kevin McCarthy, who said in the same week that Ukraine funding could be in jeopardy.”
If you’re calling for negotiations with Putin now, over the objections of the Ukrainians, you don’t get to call anyone else “soft on Russia.”
ADDENDUM: Even by the standards this president established in his first year and a half in office, he’s generated some eye-poppingly odd statements in the past few weeks. The economy is “strong as hell,” his student-loan bailout was passed by Congress, “Armageddon,” he’s brought down the cost of energy, and Gisele Fetterman will make “a great lady in the Senate.”
And as Dan McLaughlin notes, with less than two weeks before the midterm elections, Biden is maintaining the schedule of a semi-retired man.
We will see if, after the midterms, Democrats inside and outside of the White House can speak more openly and honestly about Biden’s physical and mental health. If they suddenly tell you that at age 80 he can no longer be president, remember who insisted that he had so much energy that not even White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre could keep up with him. And remember who was pointing out that his long absences during the collapse of Afghanistan were a sign that something was terribly wrong.