Does John Fetterman Really Want to Be a Senator?
Jim Geraghty, National Review
On the menu today: Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman thinks everyone is being ridiculous for getting hung up on the Senate dress code — revoked for senators only; staffers, pages, and visitors must continue to “dress appropriately” — and that people shouldn’t focus on that. Fine, let’s take a look at Fetterman’s record since he was sworn in, including an absence rate that is only exceeded by California senator Dianne Feinstein’s. Even beyond his stroke recovery and mental-health struggles, Fetterman has said he finds the Senate to be fixated on dumb things, and he’s understandably pained by the long stretches of separation from his family. Obviously, Fetterman doesn’t think the job is worth the aggravation of putting on a suit. In light of all this . . . is Fetterman being a senator really the right choice for anyone? Most notably, even for himself?
Why Do You Run for Senate If You Think the Institution Is Dumb?
If you’re a man who really hates wearing a suit, then perhaps being a U.S. Senator isn’t the job for you. I assume that before he made the choice to run for Senate, John Fetterman had seen the Senate. C-SPAN is on just about every cable system. The notion that male senators wear suits up on Capitol Hill, and in particular when they’re on the floor of the chamber, cannot possibly have been a surprise to him.
In fact, back in October 2022, when a Pittsburgh radio-show host asked Fetterman, “Will you wear your hoodie on the Senate floor?” the candidate responded, “I’m going to only wear what you’re supposed to wear and whatever dress code.” Eh, never mind, I suppose.
You probably noticed that the U.S. Senate has dropped its dress code for senators, and the reason is pretty much that Fetterman doesn’t want to wear a suit anymore. You may not have seen a July interview with the New York Times, in which Fetterman told the paper, “It was a eureka moment when I figured out I don’t have to be in a suit to stand at the threshold of the Senate chamber, going ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’ and it was amazing. I’ve been able to reduce my suit time by about 75 percent.”
Our Jeff Blehar writes today, “The relaxation of the code applies only to the senators, not their pages, staffers, or to visitors. That is telling as to Majority Leader Schumer’s concern about maintaining some semblance of standards (he himself felt the need to stipulate in his announcement that he would continue to wear a suit, which is a shame; I think we’d all prefer to see what Schumer looks like in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals).” Eh, speak for yourself, Jeff.
The website for the U.S. Capitol visitor center still states, “The Capitol is a working office building. Please dress appropriately and behave in a respectful manner.”
Fetterman, unsurprisingly, thinks everyone is overreacting to his choice of attire:
“Oh my god!” Mr. Fetterman said sarcastically on Tuesday of the hand-wringing about what would become of the nation’s Capitol if he were to preside over the Senate in a hoodie. “I think it will be OK. The Republicans think I’m going to burst through the doors and start break dancing on the floor in shorts. I don’t think it’s going to be a big issue.”
Fetterman doesn’t want to be judged by his wardrobe. Okay. Let’s look at his record since joining the Senate.
So far in his Senate career, Fetterman has missed 33.4 percent of the Senate votes. He is the chamber’s second-most absent member, behind Dianne Feinstein of California, who has missed 46.3 percent of the votes this session. Much of Fetterman’s absence was during his six-week stay at Walter Reed Medical Center in treatment for clinical depression — he missed 85 percent of the votes in February and March. But not all of it was from that time period; Fetterman also missed 13 percent of the votes from July to September.
On July 19, he missed a vote to require the president to consult Congress before withdrawing from NATO. On July 11, he missed a confirmation vote on Xochitl Torres Small to be deputy secretary of Agriculture. And two days later, he missed confirmation votes for Kalpana Kotagal to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and David M. Uhlmann to be assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Confirmation votes like those are not the most exciting, dramatic, or consequential tasks of a senator, but they are part of the job. I would have figured that a guy who missed so many votes out of the gate would have tried to avoid missing many more for the rest of the session. The U.S. Senate has a lot of “state work periods” in which lawmakers aren’t in session, and the chamber rarely holds floor votes before Monday night or after Thursday evening. It’s not like Fetterman has the commuting challenges of senators from Hawaii, Alaska, or the West Coast.
In that New York Times interview in July, Fetterman did not sound like he was enjoying his new life as a senator. He told the paper that he thinks the Senate has “a fixation on a lot of dumb s***. Bad performance art is really what it gets down to.”
Mind you, this is not the fuming of a minority-party backbencher with no real influence. Schumer’s running the Senate, and Fetterman was assigned to the Agriculture, Banking, and Environment committees, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Special Committee on Aging, a pretty good selection for a freshman senator.
Understandably, the time away from family is weighing heavily on Fetterman. “When you become a senator, you’re going to be spending 50 percent less time with the people that you love. That breaks my heart. I get emotional thinking about it. FaceTime is much better than just a phone call, but that’s the worst part of the job.”
In a cover-story profile for Time, Fetterman said that when he checked himself into Walter Reed, he was “gaunt, listless, barely able to function.” He told the magazine, “He didn’t actively contemplate suicide . . . but he would have welcomed death if it came.”
I’m very glad Fetterman is in a much better mental space now; everyone should be.
But I read all of that and think . . . should John Fetterman be a senator? For his own sake? By his own admission, he thinks the institution is “fixated” on dumb things and hates being away from his family. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was struck by crippling depression that required hospitalization. And he’s also attempting to recover from a life-threatening stroke. The state of Pennsylvania has roughly 12 million people. Are we absolutely sure there’s nobody else in the state who could do this job?
Allow me to offer a completely different theory on Fetterman’s insistence that he keep wearing his old clothes when at work in the Senate. Pretend you must describe John Fetterman to someone who’s never seen or heard of him, without referring to his appearance.
He’s not known for his soaring oratory. In fact, it’s not likely that you remember anything in particular he’s ever said. He’s not known for being a bipartisan dealmaker; as lieutenant governor, he rarely ingratiated himself with members of the Pennsylvania legislature. He was mayor of Braddock, a small town where the mayoral-vote totals don’t exceed three digits, a place so devastated by decades of economic decline that it was used as a filming location for the post-apocalyptic movie The Road. Fetterman meant well as mayor, but it’s hard to say the town experienced a remarkable renaissance during his tenure. And as lieutenant governor, Fetterman worked the lightest of schedules; his “daily schedule was blank during roughly one-third of workdays from January 2019, when he first took office, to May of this year, when he suffered a serious stroke,” the AP reported.
What is John Fetterman known for? The way he looks and the way he dresses.
Back in October of last year, I went through all the profiles of Fetterman written over the years, and almost all of them were fixated on Fetterman’s unusual appearance:
Way back in 2009, Ed Pilkington of the Guardian called him, “America’s coolest mayor” and gushed, “Everything about him stands out from the crowd. . . . He is 6ft 8in tall and weighs 300lbs. With a shaven head, big ears and a goatee, he looks like a James Bond baddie rather than the political leader of a community in the north-eastern US. He walks around town dressed in black workers’ overalls and steelworkers’ boots.” Around that same time, a Rolling Stone profile of “The Mayor of Hell,” written by Janet Reitman began, “John Fetterman looks a lot like a convict. For starters, he’s 6-feet-8, weighs 320 pounds, and has a shaved head and a bushy chin beard. He dresses most of the time in modified prison garb: Dickies work shirt, baggy jeans, black steel-toe Dr. Martens. His arms are the size of small trees. He also sports some impressively large tattoos.”
In a 2011 New York Times magazine profile calling him “the Mayor of Rust,” Sue Halpern described him as “a 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other . . . a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos — organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven — to the disenfranchised.”
A bit more recently, James Bennet, the brother of Colorado Democratic senator Michael Bennet, wrote in The Economist that, “Fetterman defies all political convention. Well over two metres tall, bald and goateed, he sports a hoodie and baggy shorts regardless of weather or occasion. At rallies he extends his long arms, taking the crowd in a virtual hug and revealing the tattoos lining his forearms.” Most recently, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine called him, “an enormous white man who had played offensive tackle in college and appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory.”
In Politico, Holly Otterbein acknowledged the obvious: that Fetterman’s distinctive size and appearance are a big reason why he became one of the most frequently profiled small-town mayors in American history. “Fetterman is one of the most photographed rising stars in the Democratic Party. As gargantuan as Lurch Addams, with a bald head, goatee and closet full of Dickies shirts — and tattoos running down his arm marking every date a life was taken while he was mayor of his hard-knock steel town — Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is a cartoon image of a working guy from the Rust Belt. Which is catnip for glossy magazine spreads.”
The way Fetterman dresses is his brand, his signature, the key to his appeal. He looks like a really big blue-collar guy, even if his life experience is quite different from what people assume.
Put Fetterman in a suit, where he can’t show off the arm tattoos, and he’s just a really tall, really big, bald senator.
Finally, lest we forget, part of Fetterman’s election depended upon a lengthy effort to mislead voters into believing his recovery was progressing well ahead of schedule.
A little less than a year ago, John Fetterman’s doctor, Dr. Clifford Chen, wrote a letter, released by his campaign, declaring, “Overall, Lt. Gov. Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices, He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.” Fetterman declined to release in-depth medical records.
And then, about a week later, Fetterman went out onto a debate stage and struggled to communicate. As Joe Scarborough summarized afterwards, “John Fetterman’s ability to communicate is seriously impaired. Pennsylvania voters will be talking about this obvious fact even if many in the media will not.”
