I’m not going to get into the recriminations and deep “analysis” of the Fetterman-Oz debate last night. Suffice to say that I do not think Fetterman is cognitively impaired so I don’t care to engage in theater criticism of his “performance” as he recovers from his stroke. The Senate is full of stoke survivors, even right now. Senator Ben-Ray Lujan and Chris VanHollen both had strokes this year and they’re doing fine. Mark Kirk of Illinois had a much more serious stroke than Fetterman, was out for a year and remained significantly disabled and yet was welcomed back with open arms and served for another five years without any hint that he was unable to serve.
So, as far as I’m concerned there is no logical reason why anyone should change their minds and vote for a con artist TV personality with zero political experience who is running in the election denying party of Donald Trump (with his enthusiastic backing) over a man with progressive values and tons of experience who happens to have a temporary disability. It’s incoherent, IMO.
But that’s neither here nor there. It’s up to the people of Pennsylvania to decide and I just hope they don’t pick the guy who says that abortions should be decided by “a woman, her doctor and local political officials.”
The Washington Post featured an interesting story about Fetterman this morning which would have gotten more traction if he’d been more successful in the debate last night. It’s not all ositive by any means, but it does show the kind of mavericky, “get it done”, sensibility of the man who worked hard to revitalize his town with unorthodox methods. Apparently, he stepped on some toes in the process and even offended the old timers who didn’t want the hipster sensibility that Fetterman used to lure in entrepreneurs and investors.
“I think you can best determine what your values are by where you chose to spend your life and your career,” Fetterman, 53, said during an interview earlier this month with the PennLive editorial board. “Twenty-one years ago I came to Braddock, which is an overwhelmingly majority Black community that was abandoned and forgotten and I chose to run a GED program. There’s no money there, there’s no glamour there, it was a commitment to make sure these people had the opportunity to get their education back on track.”
Fetterman ran for mayor in 2005. His young mentees plastered “JKF” stickers all around town — Karl is his middle name — and the vote was a squeaker: a 149 to 148 victory for Fetterman. It wasn’t a mandate, and the borough council was wary of Fetterman’s grand plans. For his part, Fetterman quickly concluded local government was a dead end.
“If there was a dream team of holding everything collectively back, you couldn’t assemble a finer group,” Fetterman told Pittsburgh City Paper months after his election. “I mean, if your mission was to stifle any kind of creative energy or idea …”
Several council members Fetterman served with have died, while others declined interview requests or couldn’t be reached. In an 2015 interview with the PennLive website before his death, former council president Jesse Brown said Fetterman didn’t seem to understand the mayor’s limited powers in a borough predominantly controlled by the council.
“He first come in thinking that he was in charge of everything,” Brown said. “After a couple run-ins him and I had, he stopped coming to meetings. He should have been in all council meetings to break a tie in case there was a tie or if he had some input he could put input in, but he didn’t do that.”
Doose, though, said she didn’t blame Fetterman for skipping most meetings. “He could have argued with them until he was blue in the face,” she said. “It was not a productive environment.”
Incompetence and corruptionalsoplagued the town government in those years. Two months after Fetterman became mayor, the council sued the elected tax collector for failing to turn over records of unpaid property taxes. In 2011, the borough manager pleaded guilty to stealing about $170,000 from the town. The borough’s financial activities also were constrained by a state oversight program for poor communities.
So the new mayor turned to Braddock Redux, which he had started with his family’s money in 2003. The nonprofit spent $50,000 that year to buy a century-old, red-brick-church in Braddock, which Fetterman envisioned becoming a vibrant community hub with recreational and educational programs for kids and young adults.
Over the next few years, Fetterman’s efforts as mayor to draw attention and money to the blighted town drew outsize attention — from Rolling Stone magazine to “The Colbert Report.” The buzz attracted Levi Strauss & Co., which saw the gritty community as the ideal setting for its “Ready to Work” advertising campaign. Fetterman insisted on locals starring in the ad — and on a generous donation to his nonprofit.
Levi Strauss & Co. contributed $948,001 to Braddock Redux between 2010 and 2012 to support the renovation of the community center and a vacant, weedy lot into a vegetable farm, according to a company spokesperson. Doose said the tiny borough did not have the capacity to handle those projects.
It sounds as though he was really trying to do something. And, as per usual, it shook up the establishment.
The Post goes into all the financing suggesting that his family backed more of the project than has been revealed although I don’t know why that should be a problem. They note that Fetterman didn’t take money from the foundation and it doesn’t appear that anyone was siphoning off funds or anything. I’m not sure what the point of this suspicion is. His father said that he supported his son’s projects because he believed in them which I guess is just impossible in the minds of the cynical media.
They admit that he was doing what a lot of small communities in that blighted area are forced to do:
In this economically hollowed out corner of the Rust Belt, it’s not unusual for local governments trying to boost the quality of life for residents to turn to nonprofits, experts said. In Allegheny County, Braddock is among 128 municipalities, some of which are small fiefdoms with shrinking tax bases that can’t cover basic services.
“This is considered the most fragmented local government structure of any region in the United States,’’ said Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “Many local governments are so small or distressed that they don’t have the fiscal capacity that is common elsewhere. The result of that is that you see a large role for nongovernmental organizations attempting to fill the void.” …
One of his constituents said this:
“It’s a dying community, forgotten, and he put some adrenaline in it,” Johnson said of Fetterman. “Did he change everything in this town? No. Did he make a difference? Absolutely he did.”
It’s a truism that no good deed goes unpunished. Let’s just hope that Fetterman defies the odds.