Gisele Fetterman was fairly quiet behind the scenes of her husband’s campaign for U.S. Senate. While just about everyone has been focused on John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz, the increasing focus on Fetterman’s stroke and his cognitive abilities reached a boiling point after an interview aired by NBC News made it clear he was not doing well.
Several pundits and journalists on social media lashed out, but NBC News stood by the interview. However, Fetterman’s wife then got involved, and basically declared herself anti-First Amendment in the process.
What’s more, Ms. Fetterman has, since the stroke, made herself more and more the surrogate for the campaign. That, too, came to a head recently when a journalist actually said the quiet part out loud.
Tweet by Kara Voght of Rolling Stone magazine that was later deleted. (Via Twitter)
That tweet was later deleted, but the message is clear: John Fetterman, the candidate for Senate from Pennsylvania, has been almost fully pushed to the side, and his wife is now the person people will identify with the campaign.
The problem, however, is that Fetterman is the candidate. People already know who he is and, more importantly, that he has had a stroke and is struggling. If he’s being essentially cast aside at this point and his wife is taking all the campaign press for herself, that’s only going to further marginalize him in a race where he’s been losing ground pretty consistently for weeks. And the strangest part of all this is the fact that it didn’t have to be this way.
Fetterman’s stroke was days before the primary. While the campaign played it off at the time, Fetterman later admitted in an interview that he “almost died.” A situation that vital? You let another Democrat take over. Instead, the campaign lied and downplayed the seriousness of the stroke, and it has since become apparent that he’s got some pretty serious symptoms. He’s not healthy, and it’s affecting his performance on the campaign trail to the point where his wife is essentially taking over.
So now, the Democrats have a problem. Oz is catching up. Some Republicans even think he can win. If he does, every Democrat in the country needs to look at what happened here and realize just how badly the Fetterman team screwed this up. Because every indicator was that this was a sure pick-up for Democrats.