Team Fetterman is scrambling to dampen supporters’ enthusiasm for their candidate before Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania U.S. Senate debate, in which Fetterman and Mehmet Oz will square off. The Keystone State’s early voting period has already started. Thus this discussion comes too late.
In an email sent to the press, the Fetterman team tacitly admits that their candidate is in jeopardy on Tuesday night by emphasizing, “Dr. Oz has been a professional TV personality for the preceding two decades.”
Strangely, the campaign letter paraphrases a previous article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which noted that “Fetterman wasn’t brilliant in debates,” before finally admitting that “this isn’t John’s formula.” Despite Fetterman’s recently badly received a sit-down interview with NBC News and his iconic stump speech gaffes (the Eagles are…so much better…than the Eagles), they do not define what *is* Fetterman’s format.
Moreover, the Fetterman email states, “Oz certainly comes into Tuesday night with a major built-in advantage,” implying that their candidate has not recovered sufficiently from the stroke he suffered earlier this year, which kept him off the campaign trail for weeks.
The email calls Oz a “professional TV actor,” but it doesn’t add that Fetterman, as an elected person, ought to have accomplishments to brag about that Oz, who has never held public office, wouldn’t have. Perhaps Fetterman’s past is less than stellar, and it’s not only because of his linguistic challenges. According to the letter, if elected, Oz will begin “false assaults on crime, fracking, inflation, and taxation,” allowing Fetterman to escape responsibility for his own record. But since they are true, these critiques pack a punch; Tuesday’s debate will be a test of Fetterman’s ability to effectively rebut these points.
It would appear that the Fetterman camp is just as worried as the Oz camp about what their candidate would say and how he will say it in a debate with Oz. “Oz’s pals and right-wing media” would allegedly “circulate unpleasant viral films that seek to present John in an unfavorable light due to uncomfortable pauses, omitting some lines, and mushing other words together” after the debate. If a candidate’s own team recognizes that he is weak in debate, it’s best not to nominate him.
But as Fetterman’s campaign points out in the letter, “John has made remarkable progress, but he still has significant issues with auditory processing that need to be addressed. The people of Pennsylvania deserve to hear from their Senate candidates, and John is here despite the hardship of the work at hand. “The transmission goes on.
Still, even that is a reinvention of history. Both liberal and conservative media outlets could not afford to put off tackling Oz until after the election, which is why Fetterman is doing so now. Despite agreeing to a debate after pressure from publications like The Washington Post, Fetterman’s camp still doesn’t think it’s a good idea for voters to hear directly from Fetterman in a straight confrontation with Oz, as seen by the statement aiming to dampen voter enthusiasm.
Even if he loses the debate, Fetterman will still be elected, the email asserts confidently.
The story claims that Fetterman’s camp thinks their candidate isn’t competitive because he doesn’t pose a serious challenge to Oz and because his record isn’t impressive enough to run on. The Fetterman camp has reason to be anxious, and it’s not only because Oz was a TV personality; the latest polls show that Fetterman has a lead of only 1.3 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average.