There were five seconds of silence that seemed like minutes, followed by as many more babblings and repeated phrases. “Earth, swallow me”, the non-response thus composed could be translated.
At the Rookie’s Craft Burger roadside bar, on the outskirts of Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, the barely thirty attendees of the small Democratic party organized on Tuesday to follow the great debate of the night between beers and snacks could not hide their disgust and their hurry. It was known that Senate candidate and Lt. Governor John Fetterman was still in the aftermath of the stroke he suffered in May and was sometimes slow to articulate his words. He said it himself at the beginning. But still… TV can be cruel, and Republican challenger Mehmet Oz knew the medium well after four years running his own medical advice show, The Doctor Oz Show.
The fateful question was about f , the hydraulic fracturing extraction of fossil fuels that brings Pennsylvania so much revenue from its huge gas reserves. Debate hosts asked Fetterman about his radical reversal of his position on the controversial technique; he was reminded of how in 2018 he rejected her and yet recently defended her. Then, after those endless seconds of silence, the candidate barely said, “I support fracking. And I don’t, I don’t… I support fracking, and I stand by it, and I support fracking.”
In response to Fetterman’s speech difficulties and agility in reactions, the organizers of the debate on the News Nation network had installed two 70-inch monitors that showed the interlocutors the text of questions and answers, transcribed instantly. The democrat had to follow what was said and answered in this way, and part of his delays in responses could be explained in this way. But the lapse in the fracking issue sank him. And there was no shortage of commentators on Twitter and other networks who rushed to predict a certain defeat for him due to such a stumble in a face-to-face that, with a television expert on the other side, he should not have accepted.
The gestures of the Rookie’s attendees after that and some other bumps from the Democrat said it all. An older woman turned to face the television, raising her eyebrows from time to time in amazement or regret. Beside her, a man with a Fetterman pin pinned to his chest stared at his cell phone and never looked up. The local Democratic caucus member who was running the meeting and greeting the attendees, Dane Stuart, got up from his table and went to the bar to chat with a young man. Most of those present also lost their attention, disconnected from the debate at times and started chatting with each other.
“The truth is that John has not had his best night”, agreed to admit the chief host of the event, Stuart, and the one in charge of guiding outside visitors, Nacole Moore. Both and two other members of the team kindly approached the table occupied by this and another journalist to answer any questions we had, and incidentally to find out who we were and what companies we worked for. “Barcelona! Ooohhh, how wonderful”, they said when informed by the headquarters of this newspaper.
The suffering of the Fetterman supporters at Rookie’s was undoubtedly the suffering of millions of Democrats in the United States. The race for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania is one of the closest among half a dozen of them that will decide whether the Biden formation manages to retain control of this parliamentary body, once the Democrats themselves consider it much more difficult to maintain the Lower House .
But the ultimate effect of Tuesday’s debate remains to be seen. Among the analysts and strategists who weighed in on the matter, there was everything, not just doomsday for Fetterman. In front of a senior Democratic official who told the AP agency on condition of anonymity that he did not know “anyone, not even the staunchest supporters of Fetterman, who thinks that he did well last night,” Reuters quoted a rehabilitation specialist from stroke patients, Sonia Sheth, for whom the candidate did very well. She “she had some mistakes, but she also spun well-thought-out, fluent responses. He will continue to recover,” she said.
Fetterman began his speech by alluding to the “elephant in the room” that was the effects of his stroke and warning of possible gaps in his performance. Maybe that helped him. If anything, anguish gave way to empathy. In the three hours following the debate, the candidate’s campaign raised a million dollars from his supporters. A milestone.
Two weeks before the legislative elections on November 8, the Democrats suffer. But they do not lose hope.
