The national media had quite a week making themselves the story in the Pennsylvania Senate race. First, reporters made an issue of Democratic nominee John Fetterman, who is recovering from a stroke he had in May, using closed captioning during an interview and stumbling over a single word. Then other journalists had to clean up the previous journalists' baseless questioning of Fetterman's cognitive abilities.
Republicans have sought to make Fetterman's health an issue in the campaign, in part to take the spotlight off of their very flawed candidate, TV huckster Dr. Mehmet Oz, a recent transplant from New Jersey.
Fetterman, who got back on the campaign trail in August, has been slowly working his way back into the media scrum. But after the dustup this week, he put out an ad Friday in which he discusses his stroke, recovery process, and how it has put him more in touch with the struggles of everyday Pennsylvanians.
"After my stroke, I was just grateful to see Gisele and our kids,” Fetterman says at the outset. “Across Pennsylvania, I keep seeing families that don’t have enough time to focus on each other. They’re struggling, left behind.”
Honestly, which family with kids hasn't felt that tension between making ends meet and spending quality time with loved ones? It's as relatable as it gets.
“We’ve got to make it easier for people to spend time with those they love,” Fetterman adds. “Politicians spend so much time fighting about the things that don’t matter. I’ll always be focused on what does—access to health care, lower costs, good jobs, more time with those we love.”
Other politicians don't get it, Fetterman suggests—I do. Then he pivots back to the pillars of his campaign: what he will do to bring relief to Pennsylvania families overstretched by the high cost of living and not enough time in the day.
It's a damn good ad. Maybe Fetterman would have made the commercial anyway, even without the week's events. But he shouldn't have had to.
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On this week's episode of The Downballot we get medieval on the traditional media for its appalling display of ableism in the wake of John Fetterman's recent NBC interview; recap the absolutely wild goings-on in Los Angeles, where City Council President Nury Martinez just resigned after a racist tirade was caught on tape; dive into the unexpectedly close race for governor in Oklahoma; and highlight a brand-new database from Daily Kos Elections showing how media markets and congressional districts overlap.