When Democrat John Fetterman (PA) was running for the Senate against Dr. Mehmet Oz, he suffered a stroke, and I wrote at the time that he should have dropped out of the race.
I never took cheap shots at him because I have personally seen how devastating a stroke can be.
In fact, I noted that Fetterman needed to be concentrating on recovery, not on running an election bid. Well, it has now emerged that the Senate campaign almost killed him.
Fetterman has found a soft spot with MAGA in recent months after coming out and blasting Democrats repeatedly on a range of policy issues, a situation that stands in stark contrast to the attacks he took from the GOP during his Senate campaign.
For instance, he has not held his tongue about Obamacare subsidies that Democrats set to expire in what turned out to be a strategic backfire.
He stated, “Democrats designed those tax credits to expire at [the end of] this year. That’s the Democratic Party. That’s not something they’re taking away.”
Fetterman continued, “They’re saying, we can have a conversation to extend them. And I do hope we should, and I think many of their constituents are going to be impacted, too. And that’s why I think that’s a way forward to find that without dropping our entire country into this [kind] of chaos.”
The senator has also blasted leadership during the government shutdown “crisis.”
He stated about his engagement with his party's leadership during the standoff, “I was not in a conversation, or I never got any outreach.” Since Fetterman was a clear “no” on blocking the funding, one would think that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would have reached out to him, but that clearly never happened.
To that point, when asked who was really calling the shots in the party, Fetterman stated, “No one really knows.”
That is a pretty damning statement from a senator who had become the face of his party after his election. It was not that long ago that the ladies of The View were suggesting he run for president, but then again, they said the same thing about Stormy Daniels' former lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who now resides in a prison cell.
Fetterman recently opened up about his stroke, his Senate campaign, and how he literally lost the will to live during that time.
The host of negative comments from critics, such as “moron” and “unfit for office,” got in his head, and he explained that it was "a defining quality of depression, the building blocks of which I had probably struggled with ever since I was a kid. My parents were 19 when I was conceived, and I have always felt it was because of me that my parents were unable to follow their own dreams. When your self-image is negative, as mine was growing up, you gravitate toward shame. You gravitate toward feeling unwanted."
The real troubles for Fetterman came after a debate against Oz, when it became clear to many that perhaps he should have exited the race. He explained, "For months, I was suicidal. Paranoid. Not eating. Not sleeping. Not speaking. Not functioning. Resigned. Ashamed. Despairing. Despairing everywhere I was. Up was down, and down was up. Once, as I lay in bed, I asked myself, What would you do if there were a pill on the nightstand you could take and not wake up? I would have taken it."
Fetterman's wife made him leave their house for a time because she said he was bad for their children while in a problematic mental state, so he moved back home with his parents. Don’t get me wrong, as I still want Republicans to beat him when he runs for re-election, but this story does remind you how toxic the political world really can be at times.
