In a previous post I looked at the disaster of a debate for the Democrat Senate Candidate for Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, whose cognitive problems from a stroke were finally made obvious.

How did it come to this? Fetterman had the stroke a week before the Democrat Primary vote and it’s been obvious that he’s not been the same since. In former days a candidate with these problems would have been told by the upper echelons of the Democrat Party that he needed to quit, winner or not. But the smoke-filled rooms of yore have been steadily replaced by the will of the Party voter since the upsets of 1968 – although Bernie Sanders would strongly disagree after his treatment in the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Jeff Goldstein had an even more cynical take:

Revealing though that is [from The Hill’s “Rising” co-anchor Briahna Joy Gray], given that most commentators would be reluctant to so candidly say the quiet part out loud — in this case, that clear and recognizable brain damage doesn’t disqualify one from the US Senate, because even a monkey can be trained to pull the proper partisan lever

John Fetterman – and Lump

However I think there are two equally powerful reasons why he has not been pulled by the DSCC.

First, the Democrats had already got away with running a brain-dead candidate (though not quite as bad) in 2020, with Joe Biden being hidden in the basement for his entire campaign (the Chinese Lung Rot pandemic was literally a once-in-a-century excuse) They must have thought they could do it again, and of course with Pennsylvania Democrats having turned election day into election season, there will have been thousands of votes cast by people who have no idea he’s this far gone (which is, of course, the point of both early voting and late debates).

But the second reason I think is more important, in that you can only pull off the first one if the MSM, especially the National MSM based in Washington D.C. gives you air cover by either not investigating such things or even outright helping the Democrats cover up bad things about their candidate. They did that for Biden. They do it for almost all Democrat candidates. As National Review (not my most fave magazine nowadays) put it:

Allow me to offer a controversial theory: A lot of Democratic Party candidates and strategists have bad judgment because they’ve grown used to a usually friendly media bailing them out of the consequences of their bad decisions. In light of last night, the decision-making of Fetterman and his campaign seems absurd — as MBD aptly summarized, “John Fetterman should not have been on a debate stage tonight. He should be at home, recovering from his stroke.”
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A campaign does not attempt to fool people into believing that a severe-stroke victim is fine unless it’s convinced that the overwhelming majority of media in the state will be its ally and abandon their traditional role as watchdogs. The people around Fetterman are off their rockers, stupid, or both.

They tried to scare off the Republicans from touching the obvious subject, The Reputations Ruined by the Pennsylvania Senate Debate:

Even GOP Senatorial nominee Mehmet Oz “has decided to go there,” wrote Politico in an effort to suggest the issue is beyond the pale. The implication was clear: To press too hard for details about the candidate’s health concerns only served the GOP’s interests. So those questions went unanswered.

Perhaps the worst example of how far they were willing to go was when they piled on to one of their own, NBC News reporter Dasha Burns for daring to suggest that Fetterman had difficulty with questions and struggled to understand small talk in her recent interview of him:

The Associated Press, no less, published a report on the extent to which her “comment about Fetterman draws criticism,” a reportorial endeavor that consisted almost exclusively of curating mean tweets. “This is just nonsense,” podcaster and reporter Kara Swisher said of her colleague’s observation. “Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.” Fetterman’s “comprehension is not at all impaired,” insisted Rebecca Traister (New York magazine),
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They all now look like useful idiots — and there’s no defense for this level of partisan spin. The man can barely function, and everyone with eyes can see it.

I guess the MSM is blind then because some of them actually continued to pull this gaslighting bullshit after that debate.

To be fair a handful of MSM reporters did allow that it had been “painful to watch”, but even those were spin efforts about guts, courage and “ableism”. But as journalist Selena Zeto points out, all this just made the crash even worse, for both the candidate and the MSM:

Many of those watching had no idea how bad Fetterman’s health was, causing disbelief that no one had reported this sooner. And many were angry that Democrats and reporters knew all about it and said nothing.

With the inevitable result.

And not just from an online poll about the debate itself but standard polls:

The InsiderAdvantage poll now has Oz up by three points over Fetterman, 47.5 percent to 44.8 percent, with 3.6 percent undecided; 65.9 percent of independents preferred Oz to 22.5 percent for Fetterman. So, it looks like Oz is sewing up the independent/undecided votes, and it’s likely many in that undecided category will break toward Oz. It’s also probably higher than that, given that polls tend to underestimate Republicans and oversample Democrats.

It likely has not fully factored in all the debate reaction yet, although they did have a question about it. This poll was taken on October 26

I don’t think even the Democrat machine in Phillie can beat that. And of course it all raises this point.